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Interesting Niches – Simply Interests (Notes from March 30 to April 5, 2020) December 30, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, Blockchain, Coronavirus, Data Science, Digital, education, experience, finance, FinTech, Founders, global, Healthcare, marketing, questions, social, Strategy, Uncategorized, Venture.
Tags: Data, Downturn, finance, Open Source, Package, Risk, SDLC, Services
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Nat Eliason, of Roam and productivity-type videos fame, mentioned that consistency has been the primary driver for his content rise. It’s refreshing to come across his newsletters as well as Tiago Forte and David Perrell’s for how varied their content is. Typically, we don’t have one specific idea we follow. It’s a collection of all of our readings and experiences. My collection has probably been more evident in this – especially if you pay attention to the notes – generally around startups but also finance, vc, sports, media. Plenty that interest me.

So, this is hopefully my last WordPress post on here and moving to Webflow to move my thoughts and musings for the recent time further.

In light of this, I am going to be doing something with lists. Specifically, around startups. But I’ve been obsessed with historical rankings / lists for a long while. Only now going to be putting the together (I lied – I’ve been piecing the together for a while). Hopefully it leads to explorations and transparency with connecting various lists around them. Be it industry, job hunt, maybe put some clarity to the lists that are typically without much detail. We’ll see! Look out for further info.

Corona Investing (Meb Faber Podcast Part II, III)
- Staying rich and dealing with downtrends
- Cash / yield / gold all have drawdowns > 48%, so if you lose half of your money, does it matter?
- Mixture of trend following and yield can get drawdown to ~30%s
16min on the News
Yaron Haviv, CTO of Iguazio & Mahesh (ML Ops Webinar 3/31/20)
- Develop and test locally and then turning it into production
  - Package (dependencies, parameters, run scripts, build)
  - Scale-out (load-balance, data partitions, model distribution, AutoML)
  - Tune (parallelism, GPU support, Query tuning, caching)
  - Instrument (monitoring, logging, versioning, security)
  - Automate
- Streamlining collection of data, prepare at scale, accelerate training and deployment
- Why are ML Projects not deployed seamlessly? (Survey results)
  - No starting with clear business obj – why are we doing this? Similarly, not a good business case
  - Management failure including insufficient investment
  - Poor communication or not having the right skills for the job
  - Management resistance (“gut” and “real-world insight” over analytics and data)
  - Selecting the wrong uses, especially in an overly ambitious project
  - Data scientists asking the wrong questions due to lack of domain knowledge, primarily
  - Disagree on enterprise strategy
  - Big data silos
- Analytic Lifecycle – ML Eye
  - Define business mission (eg – Reduce churn rate in cc usage by 15%)
  - Project definition and resource evaluation (eg – Estimate propensity for cardholders to churn)
  - Analytic solution design – translating objectives into data science tasks, workflow (eg design churn prediction solution)
  - Capture and data preparation leading in to Algorithm Prototyping (eg prototype)
- ML Ops – key drivers for success for ML Platform
  - Resource management (ability for multiple people to use multiple GPUs/machines running environment)
  - Experiment management (ability to trace code, CL parameters, dataset for trained model – ability to keep track of result with envs)
    - Capability to store models automatically, hyperparameter optimization (framework that helps search over optimal hyper param settings)
    - Provision to store and manage ML datasets, models using tagging, automated versioning and querying capabilities
  - ML Flows (drag and drop, visual tool to build pipelines), rapid experimentation, share & re-use
  - Deployment
- Data science needs to quickly adapt
  - What worked before won’t work now or in the future – concept drift
  - Need for fast, iterative changes
  - Synthetic data to create a basis for models in times of uncertainty – no time to deal with complexities in deployment
  - Need to see business impact quickly
Wade Arnold, Founder of Moov.io with Sam Maule MP of North America at 11:FS (11:FS FinTech 4/2/20 morning)
- Services consuming vs what we’re paying for
- Moov.io as free connection of services for banks using GitHub and pulling data from gov sites, for instance
  - Project in Australia to update them
- For the big 3 core banking – they weren’t to be used on the internet originally
  - He helped add an abstraction layer
- He wants fintech to be more of a d2c term than services and layers in banking
- In the past, using Microsoft SQL or Oracle – now, you wouldn’t want that
  - All Open Source, especially internet and cloud providers enabling them
  - Not much different than IBM adding mainframes before
  - Open Source vs proprietary tech is scale

Reflecting on the Year (Notes from March 23 to 29, 2020) December 17, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Blockchain, Digital, education, experience, finance, FinTech, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, Learning, marketing, social, Strategy, Streaming, Time, training, Uncategorized.
Tags: AI, Business, Business Cards, Extension, investing, Platforms, remote, Startups
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When you just want to produce something for the day but you’ve been helping out others more than yourself, seek a site you use repeatedly for inspiration. Today’s Farnam Street and its post on quotes from AMAs 2020.

Shane Parrish, FS Founder – Jan 2020

I don’t want to optimize for work, and I don’t want to optimize for family time. I want to optimize for life. I get one life and I don’t want to look back at ninety yelling at myself because I regret doing or not doing something. I always try to keep that end in mind.

Anese Cavanaugh, IEP Method Founder – Feb 2020

Culture is the energy, the container, we create together to do our best work, show up as our best selves, be productive, and feel safe. It’s how we feel when we’re doing our work together.

Jeff Hunter, Talentism Founder – March 2020

All of us do work that matters. It may matter in a little way, it may matter in a big way. We’re surrounded by signals all the time that say some work is more valuable than others. But as I like to say, the person who cleans the bathroom and does that excellently is probably more valuable than somebody who’s the head of an organization and does it terribly.

Katherine Eban, Investigative Journalist – April 2020

As a journalist doing a book, it’s like a marriage; and I know this sounds a little cynical but,
marriages only get worse as they go along so you have to be really in love to start with. So, there’s got to be a real love there with the topic because the project and the reporting and the work is only going to get deeper and worse the further you get into the project. Start from a good strong place.

Marc Tarpenning, Tesla Co-Founder – July 2020

Long-term thinking is really this idea of always keeping as much optionality in the future as you can. Because you don’t know what the future is going to bring. So what you don’t want to do is constrain your future possible options because you’re on some trajectory.

Jesse Mecham, YNAB Founder – August 2020

Budgeting just means you’re deciding. We don’t want people spending less, we really want people spending without guilt. That approach of thinking you’re going to push through and restrict yourself just fits and starts. People do that again and again. Give yourself room to learn how you spend money and learn what you care about, and slowly as you work the four rules, you’ve found something sustainable.

Gretchen Rubin, Happiness Project Author – Sept 2020

People who have habits that work for them have a happier, healthier, more productive, more creative life. People whose habits don’t work for them have a lot more challenges. It’s a question of thinking more about how to make something [which makes you happier] into a habit.

Stefanie Johnson, Management Professor – Oct 2020

One of the amazing things about inclusion is that it’s really something that any of us can do. It’s not like you have to be a leader to make someone feel seen. Any of us can do that.

here

Transform Your Data Science Projects with 5 Steps for Design Thinking (HumAIn Podcast 3/22/20)
1. Data Collection – thorough data navigation skills
  1. Where is my data stored?
  2. How large is the data size?
  3. What quantity or quality do I need to launch?
  4. Who manages the data?
  5. When is it updated?
  6. Why is it relevant?
2. Data Refinement – Large quantities of data are good, but high quality is better – invest in refining data
  1. Who has data insight or dictionaries/features?
  2. What data requires querying, feature engineering or preprocessing? By what techniques?
  3. When will the data be ready to move to next place?
  4. Where will it be stored?
  5. Why will it need to be refined?
  6. How can it be tested/validated for consistent performance?
3. Data Expansion – With best data, problem may not be solvable. Integrations with APIs, feature enrichment.
  1. Who controls data access?
  2. What budget is available for obtaining more data?
  3. When do you stop expanding or iterating?
  4. Where can you get high quality data sources?
  5. Why are more data features needed?
  6. How do we decide what is most relevant?
4. Data Learning – Models or features for insights for the product to accelerate the workflow
  1. Who determines the benchmarks for the model?
  2. What ML framework/algos are chosen for what you will predict?
  3. When do you decide that modeling results are ready?
  4. Where will you process the data locally or in cloud?
  5. Why does product/feature require ML?
  6. How much compute time or resources are available to model?
5. Data Maintenance – Implementing into Production, while the data degrades over time
  1. Who is responsible for making changes to models with performance changes?
  2. What triggers/pipelines/data jobs implemented to monitor quality of data?
  3. If data falls below benchmarks, what do you action?
  4. Where do you commit time in schedule to monitor pipeline for qc?
  5. Why do your data modeling results decrease in quality in production?
  6. How do you communicate the results to PM, Data engineers, software engineers and in what frequency?
Remote Work and Our New Reality (a16z Podcast #529, 3/23/20)
- With GP Connie Chan for consumers, David Ulevitch for enterprise
- Scaling enterprise and infrastructure operations
  - Prioritization, scaling and outages – platforms that are cut and pasted
  - Legacy technology or video codecs make it tough to scale for the way you’re doing
    - Tandem (watercooler), Zoom, Around the World
- More people to chat / participate in a virtual setting
  - Recording and autodocumenting/archiving is easier than real world
- Online classes and verticals – v2 curriculum beyond streaming and animation, A/R or interactive ways
- Classes can fill up in the real world and now, with online settings, it can’t
- Krisp – background noise elimination or Muzzel – popup notifications off during screen sharing
  - David is used to WebEx (from time at Cisco) for being always-on video conf
  - More engaged for virtual
  - Tandem will show you what you’re doing / what app – collaborate if shared google doc
- Gaming and entertainment – playing with friends, children and maintaining relationships like Roblox
  - David installing an Xbox One even as a software dev moreso than gaming, but alone
- Asana / Workboard to align teams and communicating what’s important for org transparency
- Telehealth or telemedicine – more people going remote
- Remote work – myth for jobs that aren’t possible to successfully do remote
  - Test case – most people aren’t comfortable video conferencing, but forced to
  - Some like the separation of work and home life – people do want to work where they want and live otherwise
- What are the products/features – A/R or fashion show – save items for later when you overlay digital as a second screen
  - Browser extensions or different destination websites
  - Is it a horizontal or vertical platform that wins?
Investing in the Time of Corona Part I (Meb Faber podcast #206, 3/20/20)
- Preseason training – running after practice to make it easier for games
- His firm has 45k+ investors and he’s heard from only a few of them
- Get rich – more money, and all relative
- 100k in net worth is Top 10% globally but 1M is top 1% globally – people want roughly twice as much
- Luck as out of our hands – marrying into wealth or winning the lottery, Ken Fisher had a chapter on marrying rich
  - 88% of millionaires are self-made, other book said 80%+
  - High-earning exec, upper level management, professionally as the path to wealth
- Morgan Housel as saying “I want to be a millionaire” is instead “I want to spend a million dollars”
- Timing – best (yearly, 17%) and worst (0.06% loss), market-cap weighted equities don’t work
  - Small cap value and momentum is about 16% – drawdowns are inevitable in these types of strategies
  - Portfolio manager hat for 20% returns – would look for concentrated tilts toward global value, momentum and trend following
    - Lever up to 1.5-2x but the risk is there
- Small minority of companies with big winners – 100 baggers in investments
  - Sizing in private investments – sidestep threats to money, which is you (eg AMZN 95% drawdown on way up)
  - Money locked in – largest financial asset is house often – annuities are another
    - Paul Merriman where he gifts annuities to his grandchildren and wraps in a trust
  - Inconsistent opinion of illiquidity of house vs private
- Startup investing – QSBS treatment – investors can exclude 100% of cap gains ($10mln cap or 10x cost basis of stock)
  - Investments into retirement accounts to gain – Thiel and Levchin doing this, along with Romney
- Opportunity zones in long-term, as well
- Angel List is one of his favorite, but there are others – own sweat or your labor or with others on behaving properly
Manu Kumar, CEO of HiHello (20min VC 3/23/20)
- Founder at K9 Ventures, seed firm with investments in Carta, Lyft, Twilio, Auth0, LucidChart
- Founder of 3 prior cos, 3 with successful exits and then Carta
- Graduated in 2007, started his first company at 20, also
  - Noticed gap in ecosystem and created a job he wanted to do with K9 and seed/pre-seed
  - More capital being deployed and companies staying private longer, also
  - Seed before was $500k and now multi million
- He’s a big fan of former operators starting venture funds but doesn’t have experience with many scouts
- Founders taking early money, especially with multi stage funds – harder for option vat
  - Simpler answer for bigger firms – they’ve added new people, so what’s better than getting ball running with smaller checks
  - Safe playground and training for the newer folks at the firm as they grow
    - He believes this may phase out eventually
- At pre-seed, he has luxury to get to know teams before investing, especially since he does only 3-4 investments a year
  - At later stages, there’s a concern for how quickly rounds are progressing
  - His investment fund cycle is 5 years – 15-20 portfolio companies per fund (Fund I – 19, II – 14, III – 1/3 at 6)
  - Check sizes have inched up marginally ($400-600k now but probably closer to $600k now)
    - He has no FOMO in term sheet plays for chasing – he wants a mutual agreement on investments
- His LPs prefer concentrated portfolio, not diversification larger (Harry at 35-40)
- How do you avoid adverse selection – general issue at preseed funds (he and Tim Connors)
  - For K9 – number of investments per year means he has a very tight filter – fit for investment thesis/model and mutual fit
  - Making the call on people – diamond in the rough – help them seek the diamond
- How does he think about decision making as a solo GP? For LPs and fund itself?
  - Benefit of being a solo founder from 1996 – dealt with it already and on his own – comfortable in making judgment call
  - Leaps of faith – incomplete data
  - 100% accountable / responsible on both ends
- Venture firms fall prey to group think – limit to where it’s healthy
  - Group think and consensus is dangerous – most innovative companies are doing something unusual and different
- In 2009, for first investment out of K9 – he received a stock certificate and massive stack of papers
  - Called GPs – hands to CFO and gives to safe deposit box – what’s he do? Became the kernel for Carta (never touch paper)
  - Spent 3 years discussing this with teams before finally meeting Henry to pitch and pitch a second time
- Running HiHello has changed what he looks for in companies he invests in
  - From before, no outsourcing or distributed or remote teams on his blog on K9 – recruiting has become a nightmare
  - Remote belief was wrong for him – learn and adapt – now he is comfortable in advocating for remote
  - As an investor, you aren’t at the cutting edge of products/technology – didn’t understand Slack until HiHello usage
    - Get to experience new stack in starting a company – comm, hr, resources, tech, etc
- Fav book – How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- Best board member – different ones add value in number of ways
- What does he know now that he wished he had known before – Nothing
  - If you know too much, it can be a deterrent. Being naïve may be a good thing – learn things at the right time.
- Worst thing for venture – mega funding rounds from multistage
- Best for venture – operators turning investors more often
- Workona as most recent investment – mostly working inside a web browser, building a desktop in the cloud
Misha Esipov, founder & CEO of Nova Credit (20min VC 3/20/20)
- Using international credit history for application of cc, apt rental, loans and more
- Misha raised $69M and KP, Index, First Round, Pear and Core Innovation Capital
- Misha spent 5+ years in private equity at Apollo, I/B at Goldman
- Goldman established a rigor for being first-principle, arbitrage, structure and similar in natural resources
  - Hunt for global raw materials (credit is unique pieces of data, formula for synthesizing and refine into pipelines)
- For value – business without a clear path to generating cash isn’t an enduring business
  - Press and publicity can create the aura, but margin profile can contract and needs to thought out
- Grad school in valley and got into YC summer program and incredible access to the venture funds in the valley
  - Authentic mission for what you’re doing and being honest – brings up the challenges and why they’re comfortable
- He wants to see more VC’s creating more value by helping execs to get to world-class and small portfolios
- He admired Matt Harris at Bain Capital – one of best fintech investors with a long-dated outlook across cycles
  - Not an investor but has a curiosity for the space and decisions for data usage
- How do you manage the psychology of being a CEO? It’s his life’s work, so it’s hard to find a balance.
- David Bradford at Stanford Interpersonal Dynamics told him – at onboarding and 1:1, deliberately enter a contract with you
  - If I’m micromanaging, you have a duty and obligation to call me out – I can’t scale as a CEO without that
  - If it’s not a tier 1, company-killing, decision, he lets the team decide and make mistakes
- Leadership team must signal some diversity to go down – 3 cofounders scaled to 10 (and all new 7 were male, by accident)
  - Company example for future hiring managers for ensuring the proper candidates – reaching out to VCs
- Here is what I believe, look for and expect for you in a role – no misalignment in expectations
  - Inevitably early on, it becomes on you to determine judgment for slipping on KPIs, individual may not be responsible
- Mastery by Robert Green – when he was debating on starting Nova or go back to finance world
  - Purpose is to figure out the craft he wanted to master – financial engineering vs building org, team and pursuit
- Superpower in company building – attention, listening and spotting subtleties for following up
- Weakness – boundless potential on core business and pmf, wants to go into new thing but have to strengthen core
- Financial access for newcomers that are new/migrants to the states – strengthening this global infrastructure

Transitioning Broader (Notes from March 16 to March 22, 2020) December 8, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, community, Digital, education, experience, finance, FinTech, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, Learning, marketing, social, storytelling, Strategy, Uncategorized, Venture.
Tags: email, growth, investing, marketing, Operators, remote, Trends, VC, Venture
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I’ve been thinking of a transfer. WP pro? Off-site? Drive some different traffic, engagement.

But everywhere I look, it seems they focus on a very specific niche. Well, that’d bore me if I had to do multiple niches or pick a single to do first.

There’s a weird balance I can find between bouncing between options. Finance. Data. Products. Strategy. Read some startups here. Read funding notes here. Research there.

I think we’ll go with Webflow and try to let this be simple, easy and straightforward. Focus on the platform template and let them do the rest. Should speed up the site, also.

Why am I writing this and letting you know? Likely because I’m at an impasse personally and professionally. Got stuck professionally in consulting and contracting. When the work doesn’t seem like it can lead to further opportunities directly, we seek out others. How do we transition? What do we transition to?

I’ve overseen many projects in my time, some products, some features. If we’re looking for a broader sense – forest among the trees birds-eye view, maybe a few programs in my day. The designation wasn’t that in title, but it’s arguable. Finding the differences between product + project + program management has been interesting to read through literature in what I’d define as each. And even more interesting is going through the roles / titles in job opportunities among different companies. Loose definitions that encompass quite a bit.

I’m reading No Rules Rules. Co-writers Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, and Erin Meyer, author of Culture Map among others, dive into the transparency laid out at Netflix. Somewhat woven between stories and employee accounts is a framework for how to create this culture. It’s not for everyone, but it certainly entices to see how efficient an organization can be when employees feel emboldened and autonomous. It’s exciting, and leaves room to run. Processes and the chain of command are what hinder action so commonly throughout business. So far, the book is a fresh take on that. I’d consider checking it out! Otherwise, hope you enjoy the notes.

Adena Hefets, Co-founder at Divvy Homes (20min VC 3/13/20)
- Early stage fintech investor at DFJ and original team at Square Capital
  - Started Square Capital, the lending platform on their business – talented, dedicated group that was very successful internal
  - multiB within Square itself, by now – thinking of what she wanted to do after
- Started in P/E at TPG, as well – they wanted her to go to business school initially, but felt weird doing that without doing anything
- Fintech – not as much innovation as she’d like to see – which industries that should be changing the most
  - Inflection points in the market like housing
- Perspective as being everything – time as operator/ee at Square gave her insight to grow super fast
  - As an investor, she saw the forest of overall landscape – as founder, takes a lot to scale company
  - Believes she’d be a better investor now than before
- “Growth is challenging” – may need to think distribution channels or what it means to develop one
  - Having a hard time prioritizing what product builds we have – to understand depth, have to see and work out a solution
  - Here are the 5 Prioritizations and which allows me to go down 1 product build
- Unit economics – finance/p/e run by Jim Coulter and value-investing
  - Company’s ability to cash flow and unit economics for product (make more than you spend on each user/customer)
- Level of deploying too much capital and trying to find optimal spend for seeking new customers
  - $X to acquire the next customers (paid vs blended) – Divvy gets quite a bit of organic distribution channels
- 3 addictions for founder of a company – paid marketing, over hiring (most people want to build out a team right away), lower pricing
  - Growing and successful company shouldn’t be indicated by how many employees – no hires and 10x revenue better
  - Lower prices by 10-20% for incremental growth – careful in discipline for value of product and being worth your price
- She had an easy fundraise – her support prepared her very well and lucky
  - Debt raising compared to equity raising is far harder for diligence – home tap
  - Her investment bankers that she approached had no interest
- She is far more devoted to execution focused while her cofounder is culture, feeling and empathetic for the company
  - Tough that people may expect females to be overly empathetic when she’s focused on customers and owning how/who you are
- Pushing people hard – don’t really have “yes people” – instead, “how have you thought about x, y, z?” and “does it deviate from what we’ve done?”
  - TPG – inv committee would always have red tape – if you took exact opposite, how’s that look?
- Evicted by Matthew Desmond – challenges with rent & housing in US – don’t want to be at Divvy
- Persistence is strength – as a group, run through walls
  - Weakness can be patience
- First check into Divvy was Max Levchin, incubated by HVF and Eric Wu at Nextdoor as a mentor
- Hard role to hire for – (In valley may be VP of Sales) but for her, COO role
  - Jack of all trades – understand finance, marketing spend and other like HVAC in her business
  - 100k homes in next 5 years for large amount of Americans (where the largest REIT is 80k)
Toni Shneider, Partner at True Ventures (20min VC 3/16/20)
- Portfolio of early-stage investments includes Peloton, Hashicorp, Fitbit, Automattic, Tray.io
  - CEO of Automattic for 8 years helping WordPress get to top 10 global internet sites
  - VP of Yahoo after acquisition of former CEO post at Oddpost
- Up and down on Sand Hill road for 1999 with Uplister and then Oddpost
  - Phil and John had asked him if he was interested in venture as they were going out to new fund
  - He said yes to both True Ventures and CEO of Automattic after being asked
- Founder friendly and coaching investors/VC’s instead of bosses
  - Collaborative, where everyone is working closely, sharing credit/blame
- Being an investor and operator while at Automattic
  - Helped that Automattic was distributed because he could respond to emails/texts/Slack
  - True designed for partners to pursue deals, co’s in their own way – could multi-task
- Qualities of a great CEO and founder at companies – having seen wildly talented founders
  - Driven, generous, creative and optimistic – sales wizards
  - Love to focus deeply or obsessively (mentioned Blue Bottle Coffee – origin, experience of café, smell, prep and feel of cup – 10 years)
- Changing as investor – originally s/w eng, product mindset & overestimate product importance / idea
- He’s missed some deals, definitely
  - Instagram pass very early before they pivoted there – sometimes the timing is off and that’s okay
  - Focus on doing a great job for those that he makes a deal on
- Remote teams – where do people go wrong?
  - If you work on something that can be done remotely – it should be a win because people can work how they want
  - Fewer distractions with other stuff
  - Centralized companies that don’t trust the remote model instead of going all-in from the get-go
  - Salesperson that has to deal with geographies and sales should be in that area but you can have some centralized teams
- True had 3 very large exits – Ring (LA) to Amazon, Duo Security (NYC) to Cisco and Peleton (Ann Arbor) IPO – all built outside of SV
  - Bay Area is fantastic but it’s possible outside of that – 25% SV, half in the US and another quarter outside of that
- Pros/cons of distributed
  - Pros: access to global talent pool, happy employees
  - Cons: how to build relationship/trust without an in-person connection, so far
  - If remote, need to figure out a way to be together (Automattic is once or twice a year together)
- Favorite book – Their Eyes Were Watching, then Jim Collins’ Good to Great, also Predictably Irrational
- Time allocation for a portfolio – super responsive when they need him, half with existing portfolio and half for new
- Zero inbox person by end of week
- Biggest challenge at True Ventures – de-carbonization because it’s a completely new area and that it’s not a good place for VC
- Best board member so far – one for him was Ellen Pao from Project Include
- Most recently investment and why he said yes?
  - PiaVita – med diagnostics platform for vets – impressed by founders – wanted to work with them
Sam Parr, CEO of The Hustle (webinar on cold email 3/19)
- Crafting a message for cold email – AIDA
  - A: Attention – interesting or curious – subject line and aligning the value add there
  - I: Interest – interesting facts or use cases
    - Hustle Con to CEO, for instance, interest that people at conf are avid learners and hustlers
    - “Hate Salesforce” in reply to a tweet – hate the upload feature, for instance & you’ve an answer
  - D: Desire – Show them how life/task is better with your product
    - Do it by hand, sew dresses faster. X got a better
  - A: Action – single specific action from this point – tell them what’s next. Signup or make a scale.

I want to include how awesome The Hustle and their Facebook group Trends is. If you’re looking for ideas or new solutions to improve business/create a hell of a network or simply reach out to knowledgable people, it’s worth it. Yes, I posted an affiliate link – yes, it’s still worth its weight. Try it for $1.

Better Foundations in Learning (Notes from March 9 – March 15, 2020) November 24, 2020

Posted by Anthony in community, Coronavirus, Digital, education, experience, Founders, global, Hiring, Leadership, Learning, marketing, NFL, questions, social, sports, storytelling, Time, training, Uncategorized.
Tags: Author, Coaching, Coronavirus, Learning, marketing, NBA, NFL, NYT, Professor, Records, Teaching, Vulnerability
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Foundations. Linear effects. And continuous learning. How are they interrelated?

If you skip foundational learning because we’re too task-focused or hoping to land at an end result, you may luck into some 1:1 mapping of a linear effect. If successful, it may not even be a bad thing. After all, you completed your project / passed your test, whatever it may have been. However, that foundation that you may have missed out on (whether known or unknown) leaves something to be wanted. If the foundation is there, or often when you have the time to recognize the weakness and think systematically from there, you can make connections that surpass linear effects. Learning up from there doesn’t just climb a ladder, it adds others and helps you make connections that can be fruitful in further and further adjacent areas.

We see quite a bit of the ‘jack-of-all-trades’ or ‘generalist vs specialist’ conversations, especially in tech / data science. It’s hard to cover the depth if you start in a niche, unless you had or build a great foundation. Then it becomes easier to recognize opportunities that are similar to what you have done or learned previously. Cross referencing or adapting yourself to new language and key points that pretty much match. Then, knowledge over your foundation compounds and connections present new ideas in a better light. I’m sure this fails in some roles of various industries – but the deeper / broader your foundation is, the more likely you land on a similarity that can make it easier.

In this age of more information, it’s hard to sift through where to start foundation-wise. I think we could do a bit better on that front. I suppose this is somewhat the appeal of schooling – you get someone to hand you a syllabus and a guideline for what the frameworks are for some sort of foundation for a topic. Not up to you at that point, but it’s a block to start. After schooling, you hope that a job is a good starting point for giving you those basics while also creating your own style / fitting into processes. Rough to find yourself a machine in the cog where there’s little room for your own flare – blockers for expanding into other avenues.

What are the best ways to develop these foundations? Are there online curricula that demonstrate starter points or ones that people have found topic-specific? Each of us have our own style, so feel free to share – videos / courses / online / books / etc….

Matt Mochary, Coach to VC’s and Founders (20min VC 3/9/20)
- Benchmark, Sequoia, Brex, Coinbase, Flexport, Plaid and others
- Investor at Spectrum Equity & cofounded Totality – sold to Verizon
  - Growth equity fund in late 90s, heyday of growth internet – junior partner but couldn’t make a wave yet
  - Founded Totality with a friend, raised $130mln and hired a ton of employees
- Academy Award shortlist for shortlist documentary and Doing Good for Mochary Foundation
- Came back to SV after having kids, best place to raise a family but didn’t want to start a company
  - Wanted to become a coach, strategic thinking and coaching – students at Stanford were his first
    - They recc’ed to friends that had graduated already
- Replaced fear with joy as the motivator
  - Prefrontal cortex where creative thought occurs, amygdala is fear and anger – fight/flight
  - In world of modern thoughts, recognizing fear/anger is being self-aware – he tells others to tell him if he has them
    - If there isn’t urgency, he can wait – but otherwise, he tells someone else and has them decide
- When he has a group together – withholding neg thoughts is bad
  - Think about it and once you have it, that’s powerful – if you don’t hear the thought process, you can’t fix it
  - How to share difficult subjects that doesn’t trigger the counterparty – books “Difficult Conversations” or “Radical Candor”
  - Timing of this has to be a good thing
- Having anger named and thoughts named “Hey, I sense that you’re feeling a lot of anger and I guess is that your thoughts are _”
  - The person visibly relaxes but often less than what he says
- Imposter syndrome is fear – pick where you feel joy and take the things you don’t feel joy and remove them
  - Energy audit, essentially – hour by hour (red/green markers)
    - Could outsource tasks, stop doing them, or find out ways to be energy-raising for the things that need to get done
  - Repeat the process in 30 days and then again in 60 days
- CEO role has to take care a lot of things – need to get done and get done well
  - Cofounder example – extreme introvert and extrovert (half reports one, half reports other)
    - Introvert loved internal meetings and extroverts loved external ones
- Boards are the death of every great investor – if you sell to founders, you join their board forever – lots of time (4x year)
  - 10, 15, 20 where 40-50% are board meetings and 20-30% with partners, other time for support of portfolio co’s
    - Lose time to do what you really want to do – instead, ask “How can I be the most helpful to you?”
  - You have a network and they need introductions, customers, recruits, etc
- Every single interaction he has – always asks for feedback “What did you like?” and “What was effective?”, brutal, possible
  - Declares an action for recognition of the questions
  - If feedback doesn’t resonate with you, don’t need to accept it
- Favorite book “High Output Management”
- He was a glutton for coaching, not seeing his family – really enjoys both but needs to find balance
  - He gains energy from coaching vs the draining
- How does he feel about rising Chiefs of Staff – extension of yourself after automating and inbox zero but people still asking for more
  - Training them is key – full access to your email/calendar and sitting beside you for every meeting/call for ~2 months
  - Correlate and pattern match as you on your behalf – start with them and that gets your shit together
- If I don’t respect you, I won’t tell you about it – other will hate you for it – letting someone KNOW about being on time
- All companies should try to do Pledge 1% and act on it – feels SV doesn’t quite do its part
Peter Feigin, Kevin Quealy, Graphics Editor at The Upshot and NYT (Wharton Moneyball 3/11/20)
- Propensity scoring for people matching on probability of using a shot – marathons and faster times with shoes
- Would love to randomize experiments for everything, but tough to do that with marathon winners
  - How big an effect might a shoe matter?
- Regulations for heel heights are at 40mm but 38mm is where Alpha are (popular shoes)
  - World records have kept coming down
- Why are early returns nonrepresentative – cities tend to report last
- Rule changes for NFL that they’ll vote on: sky booth ref, continue/restart a possession after scoring as 4th and 15
- With no crowds in NBA games, possibly to identify randomness of home/away splits
  - Is it refs that end up being influenced or is it the crowd/home cooking, etc
David Brooks, NYT author (KindredCast on WhartonXM)
- Was going through a tough time while a professor and told his class – they proceeded to let him know if he needed anything, they’d be available
  - One of most powerful times of showing vulnerability and changing the design of the class thereafter
- Relationships on which are the most important – focus in class – Marriage, Vocation, etc

Into Building/Growing? Check out these Communities (Notes from March 2 – March 8, 2020) November 2, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, community, Data Science, Digital, experience, finance, FinTech, Founders, global, Hiring, marketing, questions, social, Strategy, Time, Uncategorized.
Tags: Building, ecommerce, finance, FinTech, Hiring, IndieHackers, low-code, Makerpad, No-code, SaaS, Strategy
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I think we can see a bit where we’re going as a society. Need some more community and less individual pieces. This has likely been exasperated by the current pandemic and the uncertainty of the approach taken to present a future. Thankfully, the internet does allow us connections from nearly any and all places, so for that, we can be grateful.

So, Trends would be if you want to learn from some excellent experts in the widest variety of industries. It’s for the curious, bold and excited. Ecommerce, SaaS, storage facilities, other real estate, business, professional services, whomever. There’s someone for every problem, ideas aplenty for solutions otherwise. Talk to a ton of people who just seek to do. This is all without even mentioning there’s a newsletter with a wide swath of input on the most prevalent (or soon to be) trends based on a heavy dose of research.

If that’s not enough, then whoever/wherever you are in your career, there are members that have volunteered to be mentors depending on what you’re seeking. Bounce ideas? They have that. Grow to $1mln, sure. Exit plans? Check. It’s the group to figure out what you think may be the next step. See it here: Trends link (yes, referral but I promise it’s worth it)

Next two revolve around code/no-code and building/hacking your way to product. IndieHackers, fairly split I’d guess between those that can code / develop and those that choose not to – as well Makerpad – a community of no/low-code people trying to replicate big scale/functionality with little effort. If you’re a student, especially, these are incredible – Makerpad‘s community/videos/walkthroughs are awesome value. Better if you’re a student, too. It should inspire you to start something – or at least see what it may look like.

IndieHackers – similar. Plenty of hustlers and side businesses there that you can interact with, as well as a podcast that is top notch, both for inspiration as well as knowledge/insights. See basic problems with solutions turn into full-blown businesses (Rent a Card Sign to Wedding Card printing, as two examples). The knowledge and people, from a straight global environment, is intoxicating. With the good kind.

Hopefully you’ll take these to heart and check them out. For now, these are the notes below. Some more experts, successes and adventures.

Mark Goldberg, Partner at Index Ventures (20min VC 3/2/20)
- Dropbox, Revolut, Supercell, Plaid and Transferwise – all financial things
  - BizOps at Dropbox, where company 10x’ed while he was there
  - Went from 200-1500 people while he was managing there
- Was looking for a new thing, possible operator – talked to Index and some of other best ventures
- Importance of hiring / hypergrowth – 8 week interview process at time at DropBox
  - 80% of time would be on hiring, not what he was looking forward to doing
- Highly commoditized as venture capital now – industry sees more money but offer is needed
  - Evolution over last decade – Andreesen as services, others as sector expertise, data for a few
  - Relationships as differentiator – connecting good investors, trust as foundation
- He was 30 years old in joining Index as an associate – flat hierarchy though, ton of autonomy and start investments
  - Had been associate in a p/e firm 8+ years prior
  - Find platform for the autonomy to increase your risk and search there
  - Titles have become meaningless – true question: can you lead your round? Associates can at Index.
- To ask partner for looking for seed or traditional venture fund – are you going to dedicate the time to help get to next stage?
  - If answer is no because it’s a rounding error, not worth it, likely. Earlier stage investments = more time, often.
- More angels joining – extremely risky and making money is hard
  - Upside has limitations
- If he were to leave Index, he’d ask who are the smartest people to add to cap table – rolodex for increase business
  - Historically, meeting the demand – all these great founders/operators on deeper side
- As an early board member – listen – don’t need a loud voice or overplay position as new member
  - Being judicious about when to weigh in, praise, critique – impactful areas for you to dive in
  - Favorite board member – getting to be in meetings with many at Index – Mike Volpi
    - Offering hard conversations and messages to founders
- Lessons learned while passing or no – not focused, be direct
  - Meet with an investor and then they get ghost you – try to close meetings
  - Complement or help founders with an intro or interesting cases
- Thinks fintech is booming – not a bubble currently – trillion dollars in incumbents
  - Just beginning to shift to the new crop – the 50th largest bank is $50bn in market cap
  - Rise of Monzo and Revolut for UK / Europe – are they not going to just add student loans/mortgage/lending
  - Best ones should, he thinks – Robinhood / Chime / New Bank (Brazil) – current account and then cross sell otherwise
- Favorite book – Barbarian Days by William Finnegan about surfing and surfing in SF
- Looks to see more climate tech investing
- Plaid selling to VISA – as a big win
- Enterprise software founders – “Have to get to $1mil ARR to get series A” – not true if it’s a solid business
- Data privacy company investment – new category of software to go after data privacy
Jeff Lawson, founder & CEO of Twilio (Invest Like the Best ep 158, 3/3/20)
- How to build a platform – cloud comms platform to customers like Twitch, Lyft and Yelp
- At his office – “Draw the Owl” – best values as needing to explain
  - Call to action for builders – go figure it out – doing what you do as 2 step process of draw a few circles, then beautiful
  - Early customers needed product (as API) opposed to the investor method which said it’s not a product
- Content center app, marketing – developers can take APIs that provide infrastructure to build an app at scale, quickly
- Twilio has virtualized the communications center much like AWS does computing and storage
  - Stripe / Google Maps for similar functionality
- New era for enterprise software – initially, CIO made the buying decisions and things cost millions of dollars, years to implement
  - On prem and expensive
- SaaS around turn of millennium could buy online and their heads could provision the services they needed
- For the scale and software – it’s a platform of things in their API
  - Build or die compared to buy or build
- Incorporating software into business model – company would need new back-office financial
  - Buy from vendor or build it – already built / reinvent but this would be solution after solution
- Banks with core competency for amazing software – digital banks
  - In response, incumbents can do the same thing (one of Twilio’s is ING – few years ago promoted a new CEO)
    - Becoming Agile, outside of devs, set of Agile teams – each part of small team
  - Agile at ING video on YouTube – one of largest banks’ leadership in business saying they have to build to be successful
- At AWS – customer intimacy to align by customer needs
  - A product company with a solution makes a lot of assumptions for what their customers’ needs – may not intersect with differences
  - A platform, however, can be utilized to build anything by customers – ING built a whole contact center on Twilio
    - Lots of companies as on-prem for contact centers because the contact center market was broken – move to cloud
- Their billboard in SF that’s been there for 6+ years – “Ask Your Developer”
  - Merging business with tech and developers but many companies just give them the tasks instead of the big business decisions
  - How can we do that?
- Developers often enjoy doing the work over the weekend – Hack-a-thons over weekends or doing stuff then
- Finding what it means to be a part of your tribe – heroes, symbols and rituals
  - Skip Potter – CTO of Nike, building unbreakable relationships with customers, being Agile, serving Nike
  - ING story
  - Nations / religions have many rituals – companies have rituals (say, bagels on Thursdays for all-hands)
  - Wednesday night dinner at the offices – defining who they are, with a theme each week
  - Symbols – what matters to the tribe – powerful thing you have are the values
    - Culture: what you feel when you walk into work every day, whether articulated or not
      - Can be good, can be bad during the interactions within the company
    - Values: handles on the culture – allow for you to describe and guide the culture
      - No shenanigans, foolish/nonsense – can’t just create/invent values
      - Introspect the feeling when you walk in early – pooled 15 of people about 1/3 at the time to debate
      - Be an owner
      - Wear the customer shoes – customer-centricity
        Way you are customer-centric, looking at problem/company from perspective
        Go to a customer – I will trade you a Twilio-branded shoes for your shoes
- Kindest thing anyone’s done – Kevin O’Connor as founder of DoubleClick was an angel investor in one of his first company’s (dotcom era)
  - Come to my Hampton’s house in the winter, bring a cofounder and figure out what you’re going to do, I’ll put in some money
  - No plowing of roads – would order Amazon/UPS would plow the road for them – took about 9 months
  - Invested in first company, and then believed in him as entrepreneurs
Tomer London, Gusto co-founder (20min VC 2/28/20)
- Raised $520mln for Gusto, people platform for small businesses providing one place to run payroll, manage benefits, support
  - General Catalyst, CapitalG, KP, T Rowe, Fidelity, and more – also angels Shopify founder Tobias Luttke, Sam Altman, Max Levchin,
    Matt Mullenweg, Kevin Hartz and Elad Gil – did a PhD in EE at Stanford before founder/CEO at Vizmo (customer care for enterprise)
- Originally from Israel, parents have a small clothing store in Hypha – started by picking up a VisualBasic book for the store at 11 yrs old
  - Count inventory, sizing, and could do it via a computer with inventory management software – helped his dad, grandpa, cousins and friends
- 10 years ago, moved to the Bay Area to start his PhD at Stanford – met his cofounders Josh and Eddie – family history and connection to SMB
- Fundraising = creating change as a tool
  - New channel to acquire customers that may be able to scale – $100mln ARR in 7 years, but maybe take 4 years with funding
  - Might be making promises that can’t be fulfilled
  - If you have a product, but you see an R&D opportunity for a new product to similar customer-set that may have a good opportunity
  - Investors have a lot of time to talk about start-ups so they set the tone for “requirements” for seed/A/B/C
- Fin/VC Twitter and social media – he tries to be away and off of it
  - Echo chamber may not enable the creativity of different thoughts
  - Hard to have the mental space to think different/contrarily
- Gusto started in YC 2012 Winter – had good traction, knew people and were oversubscribed
  - Josh came up with thinking about investors similarly to culture fit – values/motivation alignment sharing with Gusto
- Raised a $200mln round, working with 100k small businesses including dentists, lawyers, tech, barbershops and working
  - Look for opportunities and purpose – less about being big but around specific R&D initiatives, scaling growth channels
- Try to make sure to bring people on the cap table that can add value – specifically, VP of Product Adam Nash at DropBox has been sounding board
  - Be really picky about the people you bring on
- Delightful experience really matters
  - Product / design reviews: product quality with function, ease of use, and delight (can’t add this later, has to be inherent)
    - Delight is something of value and in a way that may be unexpected
  - People come to them because someone has told the prospects that they love their payroll/benefits provider
  - They don’t use the MVP, they use MLP (lovable product) – don’t waste time building things people won’t use
    - Scoping down to test and ship it
- How does it feel like to get paid? Maybe not anything at all – boring, just a check in the bank, missed opportunity
  - Did a design sprint (a la Google Ventures) – short period of time/process for an email experience in payday – celebration
- When you meet someone for the first time – first 20-30 seconds really matter, personality shines
  - If you understand personality of a product and brand, you can bring people in through copy/illustrations
Justin Jackson, founder of Transistor.fm and Tyler Tringas, Earnest Capital founder (The Indie Hackers podcast #152, 3/6/20)
- Picking the right market to get started in that originated from Justin’s blog post called “The Main Thing”
  - Justin was following curiosity – somewhat interesting after talking with Nathan Bashez – main thing swallows most value
    - Eating out in college with limited $, he’d order entrée and water – most folks just do that
    - Is that applicable to how we think of products? Can we frame it the way we build products?
    - Josh was doing subscription forms for embedding in Medium posts – Medium increasing audience
      - It was a nice-to-have to store
  - Insightful posts for nice, concise wrappers around important things to consider
    - Justin has a series and Tyler’s been the “reply guy”
    - This is important to think about, and then what should we think about?
    - Areas of disagreement are the implications for doing business outside of this – narrower (think: bootstrappers/indiehackers)
      - Currently, Tyler believes indiehackers should be shying away from big things and verticals
      - New twists on WP hosting, Todo app – not paying attention to 2nd order effects and incumbents
- Don’t build on top of other platforms vs building on top of others (Jason Cohen on an app store where someone else pulls you with)
  - To get traction, need big ideas and concepts and then niche down by product or audience
    - Distribution or differentiation – typically this is often in main spaces
      - CRM, PM tool, ToDo, basic ecommerce, CMS hosting – chock full of stuff
    - Tons of successful ones, lately (last 5 years), are apps – automated collections on Stripe, error collections on Rails, bolt-ons
  - Developer market is one of most unique markets – things that work there may not work outside of it
    - Devs have a larger #, avg revenue and highly incentivized to get better at what they do – maybe parallels with doctors
    - Reachable online, congregates online and tons of opportunity to reach them
    - Ecommerce first may share this, content-based, ad/news/blogs similarly compared to pure offline markets
- ConvertKit – state of union surveys between bloggers and creators – cognitive ceilings of bubbles after meet-ups and conferences
  - Differences of WP plug-in, Shopify extensions for ecommerce entrepreneurs, etc – big market differences
    - Characteristics of markets matter – pointing yourself in some direction to pull yourself, it matters what you’re first 1% is
- Size of market does matter – leaning too far – have to quantify the demand for a product in a specific category
  - Number of potential customers, new customers, average spend, frequency of purchase, growth rate, % reachable
  - His market for Transistor.fm as moderate sized podcast hosting – say, 70k customers, potentially
  - Tyler considering “side dishes” in the main verticals because of differentiation for your product and jump into distributions
- $10k MRR per founder may be the “default alive” amount but completely depends on what you’re doing
  - Young Indie Hacker as total time without massive audience/trust can’t launch a direct competitor to Google Analytics
  - Privacy-focused analytics as a trend, simple analytics, too – big audiences launch failed products all the time
  - Experience matters, everything you bring to bare matters – Justin started blogging in 2008 – built the audience over time
    - Reuben Gamez doesn’t care for audience – he knew SEO and had timing to help
- What trade-offs do you have to make for a market?
  - Where are you in your life? Stage matters – spend some time on the slopes/get your experience
- Affiliates for Justin’s foot off the ground to succeed
  - Nathan Berry – pattern in his life earlier than Justin – early 20s blogging and publishing then, selling early
  - The practice and experience matters
- Main thing for niche audience or side thing for huge audience – questionable unfair advantages, main thing in huge market
  - Pretty core product for them – “Crossfit gyms, for instance – Mind/Body went after yoga studios and everything for it as SaaS product”
    - If you have a particular product insight into P/M or payment txns – try to match the niche product where insight is overvalued
- IndieHackers as afraid of competition they make this product that nobody really wants to pay for as Unique
  - Justin brought up going to meetups in other cities/states to be the outsider and find out what they want
Gaming & Chrome OS / Steam, Going Cashless, Coronavirus Latest (a16z 16min on the News 3/8/20)
- Jonathan Lai and Andrew Chen from Consumer team, Alex Rampell from fintech team
- Steam – Valve corporation as the largest PC distributor of games after starting as Valve game
- Publishers controlled access to physical retail points – devs would take 20-30% of their games
  - Developers actually made it 70% with Steam partnership – just took 30% otherwise, indie developers rise
  - 30k games under Steam – not all would run on ChromeOS hardware, but can see smaller indies get access
    - 90mn MAU, 1 bn registered accounts – social graph that may get ChromeOS more information
- K12 education – 60% of computers are Chromebooks now – Roblox, Stadia, Minecraft as possibilities for younger
- Google Stadia may unlock tiers of games for longer sit-down sessions because they wouldn’t be able to target all platforms
  - Entertainment over long-term, new gameplay experiences – click to play alongside as an ad or video, social onboarding
- Going cashless – no employee theft, checkout line, armed trucks vs cash only (cc fees and tracking)
  - Both sides of consumer cutting and for small businesses – rich people monetized at interest margin but others on fees

What next? (Notes from Feb. 17 – Feb 23, 2020) September 25, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, Gaming, global, Hiring, marketing, questions, Real estate, social, storytelling, Uncategorized.
Tags: Ads, Automation, experience, Founders, Gaming, global, Investors, Learning, Operators, Privacy, video
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So, we are into September of the pandemic year. Fires, hurricanes off the Gulf Coast, bubbliness of tech, political turmoil, and chaos in general driving the narratives. I know that it’s been a while since we last talked. Whirlwind of finding a new place (without seeing it in person), hiring movers, figuring out the best way to move, when to pack up from my place, when to pack up everything in the girlfriend’s, moving physically, purchasing new furniture, building and organizing has swallowed almost all of the time and sapped creative energy. Pile on to that that there were fires in southern California that had reached our new paradise, enveloping the sun. Suffice to say, we finally enjoyed a weekend (still very active, though) and now room to breathe this week brought me back to WordPress.

You know how many boxes there are in moving? I can completely relate to streamers or Dave Portnoy’s adventure. It’s rough. Covid seemed to jack up prices, as well, which seemed annoying. People that had moved double the size and similar distances were 30-50% less simply due to covid risks, I suppose? The misunderstanding of how contagious or how volatile the infection is clearly resulted in a few industries that got to take advantage in the name of “safety” (moving holds the same risk as it normally would unless you weren’t being cautious/careful in who you hired and brought onto jobs employee-wise). But hey, in options, you pay for the tail risks or you implode.

I still think drones or a body camera that projects out house / apartment layouts would be fantastic for realtors, buyers, sellers, websites related to the space. However, I’m more convinced now that moving companies could do a quick consultation of job requirements with them, designers could customize spaces with accurate measurements of space (blueprints / measurements of rooms don’t do justice to the nooks and crannies, as well as the ‘efficient’ space there may be with windows, shelves, etc). I know that various websites have independently done ‘customize your room’ with their products but if there’s an easy way to copy/paste urls or route APIs with image requests to an easily-replicable copy of your room (a la body-camera / drone), you may have an easier time selling across many products/offerings/sites.

Again, the drone technology continues to improve, so it’s possible we’ll have this or something from the phone to test out as image and object recognition improve. Could likely hack together something that did this. Attach a camera to one of those Costco drones that are $15 that are supposed to stay above ground upon simply detection of walls.

Anyhow, take a look at these awesome founders and investors that I listened to on various podcasts. The mix of serial entrepreneurs, big tech aspirations and side hustles was very fun to listen to.

Ashton Kutcher, Founder & GP at Sound Ventures (20min VC 2/17/20)
- Portfolio including Lambda, Calm, Gitlab, Affirm, Bird and others
  - Ashton’s wins include Spotify, Alibaba, Skype, Airbnb, Optimizely and Time’s 100 Most Influential
- Started at Univ of Iowa studying biochem engineering – power of a computer and learning to program
  - Piqued his curiosity but he wanted to be an actor – started a production company at 25 (reality TV including Punkd, Beauty & Geek)
  - AOL Chatrooms early on – marketing Dude, Sweet in various rooms – continuation in marketing movie
  - Buffering speeds increasing – content would be digital
- He wanted to find companies that could quantify distribution of content and accelerate distribution of content
  - Met Sarah Ross over at T/C, working for Mike Arrington – hired her to run his digital divison
    - Introduce me to everyone that matters in the Valley (T/C 50), Jason Calacanis, Mike Cuban, Kevin Rose, etc…
    - Asking all the questions – made his first investment into Optimizely (A/B testing platform)
- Arianna Huffington as how does he introduce himself – as a father, first, apparently
  - Future of internet are perpetually young, tech capability – learning and an ambition for new/useful/different
  - Cutting edge of technology became his 3 teenage step-daughters so he mined them for ideas (as he was 35+)
- Major VCs and partners have a technical background, as entrepreneurs formerly or study to allow understanding of tech
  - Toward companies with technical innovation and build company off of it – but isn’t their first lens
    - Cultural narrative that may be important and valuable that you can build a product from
    - Example – #metoo as here to stay or enduring – shift towards filling the void as rightful demand
      - Looking at fertility space as trend for expansion
  - Send a snapshot of the home screens for people’s phone on Twitter/Instagram and source ones he’s unaware of
- Most brilliant people going to companies – which – did a survey with the founders
  - Distance traveled by an individual – $1k to $1mil, a dime to $100k (as incredible)
  - Growing up, he would probably say that his twin brother going through a heart transplant at age 12
  - Going through a divorce of his parents that was tough
  - Companies failed that didn’t feel good – not particularly rough since there are multiple
- Strong intuition in products not familiar – hard to get familiar
  - Eating the dog food – before investing in Airbnb, he lived in them for 6 months
  - Apple-ification of app ecosystem for UI/UX, enterprises getting smart also
    - Consumers would use their enterprise software and to use the nomenclature would be better for their CTR
    - Understanding what people want and simplify that – 3 things on a screen, where would you put the most important
- Spending time with founders mostly
  - Ability to increase distribution funnel (his 5-10+ million Twitter followers), Spotify gave him an affiliate site with a discount code
  - Largest music management side for partner, collective on branding and helping
  - Versed on being in PR – public mistakes, apologize or utilize to get out of jams, crisis/preventative PR
  - Product-sensibility, where you want to be – business, also – what does a company need to measure
    - Which metrics matter, industry standards on metrics, how to improve them
  - Portfolio manager from growth team on Stripe that works with them – narrative/storytelling
- Scaling angel to much larger institutional checks – Ron Conway was one of his earlier mentors, as well as Dan Rosensweig
  - Cap table becomes your early board – value add outside of employees, low burn, grow team, disciplines
- The Undoing Project, Scale by Jeffrey West, Trillion Dollar Coach about Bill Campbell
- Misnomer about him – he’s cold (social animal, but super awkward)
- True happiness is being able to take your time
- Biggest challenge – Building a high quality team is hard with Sound Ventures
- Celebrity investing rise – lot of people are going to lose money, Wish he’d known: kindness doesn’t always come back around
- Recent investment with Sound Ventures that he’s excited by – Community (partner helped incubate) – luxury text messaging
Jude Gomila, Founder & CEO at Golden (20min VC 2/10/20)
- Self-constructing knowledge database built by AI and human-intelligence
  - Raised from Founders Fund, a16z, SV Angel and others
- Also a successful angel in 150 companies including Carta, Airtable, Superhuman, Gusto, Linear and others
- Jude started Heyzap alongside the founder of Mercury, Immad
- Passions around tech, learning, universe working – physics in tech form (hardcore engineering) or abstract theorems (randomness/computability)
  - Never wanted to work for someone – wanted to build things, but wasn’t aware of tech scene in London
  - In uni, at 18, he wanted to start a company – formed a consultancy with a few friends
    - Large Chinese manufacturer of egg packaging into Europe – wrote a plan to how they could do this
    - They wanted them to run the business – he called every farm in the UK but they didn’t want to change
  - Wanted to find something they could do themselves for a product that people would want with margin
    - Digital photo frames – own brand into higher side of market – surprising
- April, had burnt through YC money and wanted to raise a round for Heyzap – 6 per day back to back
  - Not impressive investors, go back on their word, converged on better investors instead
    - USV pitched and they got the deal – Naval and USV for board – cool conversations on angel investing
    - Mechanics on legal terms, contracts – part of something larger
  - Put all of his money into angel investing in the next 7 years, advising as well
- Reality is out there, fairly objective – all follows similar rules, working together
  - Ethics – both sides should have ethical framework/grounds – how to act during exit or bad situation
  - One side making money, one on future – is it to top Roth IRA or something else?
  - VC wants you to win the gold medal – that’s what is important because of model
    - A personal best for you is better risk:reward, $20mln or 50 or 100 that’s fantastic, but not for VC
- Praying / spraying – he doesn’t like the praying part – more rational
  - Numbers do matter, so spraying doesn’t fit this
  - If there are nonlinear returns, you have to do 10-20+ investments (since network effects are nonlinear)
    - Nonlinear market caps of monopoly or something like this are higher but capped at $1tn, likely
  - Need to see different learning processes for various investments – has a lot of bullets and time
  - Red/black flags for situations that you’ll always say no – yellow flags that you may be able to fix
    - Markets and dynamics shift, but not human behavior – processes that identify these are very good
- Ability to get in to deals – how did he convince founders to take the money ahead of market?
  - What companies need to exist? Knew that Paychex and ADP were terrible software, similar share, org charts broken
    - Put it into a blog post of ideas that he wanted to see. Simple UI and great CX around payroll.
    - Talked about culture of Gusto that wanted to exist and be unique. An hour of no business stuff, just the culture.
  - Difficult to say whether you have confirmation or not – didn’t do well for a certain reason, can go again on the hypothesis (2-4 times)
David Sellinger, Founder of Deep Sentinel (OkDork w/ Noah Kagan, 2/14/20)
- Early Amazon work on ad-buying tech & first AI systems, directly with Bezos
  - Started RedFin, real estate, as a side hustle (8pm – 4am)
    - UX as the centerpiece, especially for investment deck:
      - They wanted to build quick, interactive maps, simple straightforward
      - He stumbled into Amazon after doing another ecommerce problem
        Google AdWords in 2001 – $0.50 per click for niche products with 50% conversion and 100-300% margin
        VP of Consumer wanted to go thru economics – $0.50 per click, $1 per conversion & repeated
  - Bezos funded Deep Sentinel
    - Provides 24/7 guards that monitor your home and best in market at a reasonable price
    - He’s not in a place to solve climate change or global politics, but can build this safety of people in their homes
- Looks like Howie Mandel & he can pull it off fairly easily (but taller)
- Line between crazy and brilliant is quite blurred – Shawn Parker for Kagan
  - Bigger visions? He has AppSumo where it’s like Amazon for software
  - Big problems that are chosen – in-depth interviews (Shawn’s with Fortune) realizing the craziness, intellect, drive to problem selection
  - Safety net for trying things worth trying because you get to rich, or super rich
- Day he launched RedFin (after year of working on it), was on the front page of Seattle Times in 2004, Imran Real Estate
  - 400k visitors on first day – ISP called saying they don’t support porn sites (didn’t believe traffic numbers)
  - Left Amazon 2 weeks after launching
- Believes that Amazon is a culture of Bezos – future holds more change than today, destroy the business today and go forward
  - Senior executives to try out and do this – categories that don’t work, Fire Phone, Amazon Music or Photos
    - David says he pays for Google Photos $150/yr – embodying the mantra
    - One day in 2003-04, advertised Madonna book “Sex” and lost $100k Google Advertising Project but they weren’t looking for it
  - Initially, Amazon didn’t run ads at first, for a while
    - If you’re looking at Samsung TV, you’ll find a cheaper or different TV for conversion
      - Had CATE algorithm (ML, Bayesian optimization) – stumbled on ad on website Code Red at Amazon credit card
        No matter what they showed before that, the most profitable thing to show the user was this ad
      - Proved the ad was the way to do it – data backed it up (after saying it was terrible and they’d never do it as retailer)
  - Balance is always a judgment call – willingness to re-litigate with any suggestion by new data
    - Process of optimization vs innovation, Thomas S Koo by Structure of Scientific Revolutions book
      - s-curve with normal science (optimization – some paradigm to optimize with evidence), build up that the model doesn’t work
        Early – matter was earth, water, fire and air before coming to atomic model
      - What are the things that don’t fit into the model – the exceptions to figure out a rationalization
- Jeff giving advice to him while starting at Deep Sentinel, launching
  - Design of the product, speed at which they move, and willing to experiment with the way they interact with customers
  - Design award for being most aggressive camera – top part is LED light ring, battery-powered and was initially designed to not turn on
    - Changed it so that the AI turns on the ring and spins – accidental launch after his team came to him saying it
    - Camera will turn on red LED light on and say “we’re watching”
- Top of funnel for Deep Sentinel – cheeky top of funnel, but tech is done very well
  - If you shoot someone, you’re the suspect, even if righteously
  - Israeli security system, and he does contracts for background checks – (In California, has to do that) – uses HireSafe once he does that
  - Mentioning that an Uber driver would be a security agent for a billionaire in the bay area – Noah asked him and it was $70k to sleep outside
- All the pieces but what would keep you from being larger?
  - Markets can be very engrained and it’s a trick to get a customer to buy a different way
    - Enterprise – wiggle your way into customer market and then switch it
  - Nobody searching “cameras with someone that actually protects house” – should be this way, but not since people are used to others
    - Redfin as them figuring out hook – address searches, neighborhoods and data for it – found the customers
    - Have to take people buying burglar alarms and getting the market that they don’t work (99% false alarms)
      - 15% of LA County budget is spent on false alarms – once people pass yard sign, it’s ineffective
- After his neighbor got burglarized, he went through and called all the security companies
  - ADT, Bay Alarm, Brinks, SimpliSafe, camera people, all standard questions – how does it prevent crime? How does it work? What do you do?
  - Salesman for ADT at his home, what’s the new tech that PREVENTS crime? “The sensor was wireless.”
  - Value was the slice of time in the interactions – AI changes the business process to make the human part efficient
    - Average home needs 24/7 availability for ~700 seconds of security a day – when people are entering or exiting the property
- Intense decision for lifetime of relationships – pitched investors, got feedback
  - Bunch of his money in to build his prototype to do first tests, F&F of $1mil for in-market prototypes
    - Put together market research, addressable market, problem and pricing
  - Shasta with Series A went from $7mil to $23mil round, did it over tranches because hardware expense
  - Using other people’s cameras, 3 months, to get to own cameras and prototype about 18 months, then 6 months for market
- Noah did his own checklist for “Operation Dragon Flame” to keep his house safe – reddit as one of the best in home security
  - CPTED – Crime Protection Through Environmental Design – active crime and other stuff
    - Front door with ivy, for instance, or a fountain with stones in it – rule #1 – answer the door
  - Ring as picking up because insurance policy and Amazon as the biggest thing for packages getting stolen
- Peleton as interesting because of being expensive enough to only get people with the money, so they don’t even notice the subscription
  - Choosing to not give away the camera because of attracting the wrong customers
- For Deep Sentinel in the future – looking at small business offerings and working on making AI faster, as well as faster hardware
  - New one coming out in 6 months, new stuff broadening platform
Emmett Shear, Twitch co-founder and CEO (20min VC 2/21/20)
- Starting Kiko calendar, just wanting an online, collaborative calendar
  - Getting funding and going to YC with a $15k fund for the summer – felt like they were doing something
  - Eventually raised $60k, used to build it out until Google launched their calendar
    - Went to sell on ebay – had a bid for $50k – took listing down because of 2 links they had
    - Ended up getting traction and selling for approx $250k – seemed like it was worth it compared to other classmates
- Took the money and made Justin.tv with his cofounder – other cofounder had a visa issue and had to work elsewhere
  - Turned it into Twitch, saw how they had to change around 400 to managing people, letting go of product control
Gabriel Weinberg, founder & CEO of DuckDuckGo (20min VC 2/14/20)
- Physics major who didn’t want to do academia and startups seemed the thing to do in 99-00
  - Idealistic right out of college – started an educational software co that went nowhere – liked the industry, though
  - Tried to raise money but failed – started next company in the bust and didn’t think about raising
    - Sold but didn’t have investors or employees – just him and a partner
  - Didn’t take venture until series A
- Bootstrapped DuckDuckGo until series A in 2011, 4 years in
  - Relatively risk averse, world heading toward data collection and saw privacy
  - Wrote every line of code, marketing and such
- Some founders have lots of net worth tied up into company (uses himself as 12 years in to DDG) – take some money off the table
- Data monopolies that underlie the data duopoly due to the network effects
  - He did a “do not track” litigation and he tried to put teeth to automatic parts for browsers
  - Scale of market and advertising auctions in place are much stronger than the previous generations of tech strength
- One channel often drives the bulk of a winning strategy – experimentation in different channels
  - Diversification play for doubling down – ends up as creative solution
  - Andrew Chen’s “Law of Shitty Click Throughs” – over time, channels saturate and CTR go down
    - CTR used to be 30%, now 1-2% – with a new channel, can be through the roof
      - He was one of the original Reddit advertisers
  - Constant measurement to see if it’s reaching a diminishing return – trying to find next channel
  - Avoid spreading yourself too thin
- Market is pretty big & DuckDuckGo has crossed 30% for market awareness – standard of trust online, be the consumer priv. brand
- Traction trumps everything – metrics depend on business you’re in
  - Generally, if you have highly engaged users, you’ll attract anyone – no numbers/tractions is all narrative/storytelling
  - Numbers there – storytelling can be terrible and you’ll still be able to get funding
  - Marketing will only get you so far – PMF underneath – constantly find counter-metric of retention/inbound funnel
    - Look at both – for Gabe, his metric was # of searches (was public as DDG.com/traffic) and now they have apps/extensions for privacy
    - Tracker blocking, private search, browser extension and now look at MAU’s (and can’t track their users as policy)
- Key is to keep business processes going – everyone on same page, develop them as 15 employees because of a distributed company
  - Scaled nicely once they figured it out but was chaotic at first – Advantage by Patrick Lencioni
  - Building a remote team – all organized and tactical – everything in one place so people can see
    - For them, it’s Asana (big view called “Our Current Objectives” – all projects and anyone can follow along, owner/responsibility)
- Feedback mechanisms and culture of accountability – has to be built into the values of the company
  - Experimental mindset – fails are good if the hypothesis and data is there at the end, running a good post-mortem for experiments
- Post-mortems for every single project – no stigma for them in the first place
  - Good projects have no blame – what could have been done better? What could change and nobody to blame?
  - Action items, templated and what went right/wrong/different
- Wrote a book called Superthinking on Mental Models – what he learned is that you can skip to the strategic thinking
- His first check into DDG was his own, but angel was Scott Banister that was a user who followed and emailed him to reach out
- Tons of people that are great in Philly, but distributed surpasses this because being open to this creates a talent pool

Disorganized Trying to Organize (Notes from Feb 3 – Feb 9, 2020) August 4, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Acquisitions, Automation, Blockchain, Coronavirus, Daily fantasy football, Digital, experience, finance, Founders, global, Healthcare, Leadership, NBA, questions, social, sports, Strategy, Streaming, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: Bill Gurley, Bitcoin, Blockchain, contracts, Coronavirus, Gaming, Healthcare, ideas, investing, Investments, medtech, sports, Strategy
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Productivity tools have been all the rage. Those familiar with adoption of new technology or tools in an office setting bigger than 20 people have likely been through what’s described as the J curve for adoption, popularized by Erik Brynjolfsson and Daniel Rock in their paper (see: https://economics.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj9386/f/brynrocksyv_j-curve_final.pdf) of September 2018 on general purpose technologies. There is a slope downward to start for the adoption because the productivity decrease and difficulty in trying to set it up often leads to a loss. Over time and the consistent use, it can go away and lead to the productivity gains we sought in the first place.

Well, I’m in that too many tools, too many valleys section. Bundle and use a tool that tries to do it all? Or unbundle and use multiple tools. If you are trying to optimize notes for one platform and it doesn’t work for your other platforms (mobile/to-go/car), is it optimal? Is 90% great if you miss on the 10% you don’t have a good solution for? I’m not sure. I’m hopeful that audio can work easily – may even jump into Otter.ai for transcription there.

A family friend of ours was so obsessed with keeping track of all his clothes, colors and features that he took it upon himself to build a database of his closet. Upon telling someone else, I recall a similar story for someone who went further and did bar codes on their clothes. You spend so much time obsessing over something you’d love organization over until that organizing takes up the time you were hoping to save. We could take this further and draw similar analogies to corporate, big companies compared to start-ups in growth as an early employee – always something to be done, may not be optimizing the work, just attempting to get something out compared to optimization runs for something that worked until it breaks. Exciting work on either end but ultimately, there’s a line you must draw.

There are tons of benefits to organization for notes, processes, documentation in that someone could come in at any point and figure out what connects to what. There’s a context. I think YourStacks is doing something like this for personal / professional use of tools and games and everything one comes into contact. There have been corporate / enterprise stack technology sites that break down webpage technology or company technologies. Then there are transparent people / companies who document it both privately and publicly for others to see. We try what we think may improve but it’s tough to know where to start.

There’s a lesson to be learned here in starting, trying to going from there. Some of us want to try to optimize all the tools or one tool to its fullest before moving forward. How good is good? Or not good enough? At what point do you pass to the next or add another tool? How many tools are too many? And will we get a bundling or unbundling of different aspects? I’m hopeful we get voice tools that enable bundling for all sorts of this. Currently, I’ve yet to find the solution. Let me know what your set is!

Dr. Tara Smith, Professor of Epidemiology at Kent State University College of PH, Erik Moses (Wharton Moneyball 2/5/20)
- Hockey – East and West split of conferences currently, top 4 teams in the East and defending champs Blues in the West are 5th
  - More or less deterministic (coin flips previously) – 50% as max from a conference if coin flips
- Mookie Betts as trying to get 10 year, $40 mil per because he’s so young
- Joined in August 2013 after being at Univ of Iowa in Emerging Infectious Diseases
Chetan Puttagunta, GP at Benchmark Capital (Invest like the Best 1/28/20)
- Investing in early-stage, MongoDB, Elastic, Mulesoft and advice for POS in enterprise software building Canvas
- MongoDB – 2012 and had experience building consumer apps from 2007-08 trying to build tech that was pretty limited
  - Felt like an advantage between large companies with proprietary data and tools compared to DIY
  - Met Elliott (MongoDB founder, from DoubleClick) – would ask best devs to work with Mongo and they responded “Don’t need”
  - DB expert – MySQL can work with everything but would miss the class of devs that wanted without planning for scale, app may not work
  - DB could handle scale, millions of users, transactional data by 2015-16, right place right time
  - Oracle as building a great database business and moved into application tier with their apps built on their db
    - CRM, HCM (Peoplesoft) to serve application – 1977 to true leader in databases in 80s, relational
  - Other timing – 1992, for instance, and it would not have worked. Cloud has been so open to these techs.
  - Cockroach for globally scalable, relational db – TimeScale for time-series IoT model, for instance after cloud enabled it
    - Specific use cases have more specifically-tailored results
  - Initiating and potential TAM Salesforce estimates from the start compared to now, where it’s much larger now than suspected
- Now, enterprise software permeates into companies all over for IoT and consumer tech
  - Caterpillar, Pharma, Financial Services, Shipping companies are all buyers
  - Diva built a CRM system for healthcare vertical on general CRM, Salesforce – multibillion dollar company
  - Client facing software is very important – system that will be helpful and customers will tackle that and tell you directly
- People come to work and complete a specific job or task – not to work or be an expert with your software
  - New tool into a workflow, only certain amount of walls to learn the software before leaving
  - Go slow to go fast – if you’re building a software solution in the start, build for 5-10 important users
    - Address the needs of those customers – generally applicable to the market (not just the single customer)
    - Won’t become an outside services or dev shop if you deliver services to the general customer
  - Workday and Viva early days – 50% of revenue were services since they entered enterprises (large installation of PeopleSoft)
    - On-prem CRM for Viva – lots of handholding, data migration and such
- Duffel (Global Distribution System) for airlines selling to consumers
  - Convoluted system to sell and the flows is astounding – entrepreneurs in payments looking to innovate in these instances
  - Found airlines and approached them to “Shouldn’t it work like this?” to get your first partners/customers
  - Patient capital of “go slow to go fast” to super efficient business – spreadsheet vs software
    - Example at Greg Shaw – Mulesoft – burned $8mln from $100mln to 200mln in revenue and burned $4mln from 2-300mln
      - Inside Salesforce, they’ve grown top-line revenues further
- Unlikely that someone else is building what you’re building
  - 2004 – Salesforce selling CRM, main competitor was Seibel – Salesforce had ACV of $4k and 15 licenses at a time vs Seibel $100k/1k
    - Go after the larger competitors when you have thousands of customers and users ecstatic about your product
  - Won’t run into competitors directly, just objections to your own system, since it’s incomplete
    - Valuing you against their internal/custom solution – take time to create product maturity before prematurely scaling
- If you’re not missing as an investor, you aren’t taking enough shots
  - 1x your capital if you miss compared to if you pass, miss on 10x or 100x
  - At Benchmark, they’re making 5-10 investments per year, so it’s 1-2 per partner
- Recruiting and sales – candidates have to feel very good as they go through the proces
  - Only way to scale the software business is to hire the best people to make the software
- Hard to stand out in SF as an enterprise software integration problem (Mulesoft)
  - Competing with FAANG in a limited labor market, have to be able to recruit amazing talent
  - For start-ups, they have 2 advantages: really exciting for them to embrace remote talent (global market)
    - Running a remote company at scale has very little to do with the tools, and more so with the work culture that’s friendly
    - Everyone meets remotely on video, even in same room
    - Writing a lot of documentation, transparency about thinking in the wikis docs so anyone can catch up
  - Offline ad inventory is very efficient – account-based enterprise software ads at airports – targeting top of funnels
  - How do you transmit a culture that was highly efficient in 10 person to 20 or 100 or 1000 and further, if you’re doing 100% each year
    - 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 haven’t been there for more than 1 year, 2 years, 3, etc..
- Most portable of early stage investing – Bill Gurley’s blog on CAC and LTV
  - Going down unit economic traps are widely applicable to all tech businesses, consumer, enterprise, etc
    - Can’t drive spreadsheet growth with CAC/inorganic growth for LTV numbers
  - Product engagement – customers in consumer and enterprise
- Benchmark as 5 equal partners at the firm, no juniors or others
  - Don’t have a NEXT topic that they have to move on to because of this, so open-ended discussions can go very deep
    - Wide networks so they can get useful people to talk
  - Probably not a question that they can’t answer
Adam Draper, Founder & CEO of Boost VC (20min VC 2/24/16)
- Seed stage accelerator, blockchain and VR
- Before Boost, angel invested in 20+ co’s, including Coinbase, Plangrid, Practice Fusion
  - Geography – heart of SV and ecosystem of entrepreneurs, recently adding V/R to build
- Founder of Xpert Financial after UCLA graduation, helping later stage companies raise capital in private markets
  - Made every mistake – funding, hiring, firing, product
  - Helped early-stage companies build product and raise capital, including for a friend – wanted to mentor in bulk
    - As a family, helping people get to where they want to go
- Meeting a lot of people while raising money and helping – took him 12 months to raise his fund
  - $6.6mln after reaching out to 3k, 350 meetings and closed ~35 – basically rule of 10
- Had 52 investments in blockchain accelerator (had about ~120 companies) among currency/contracts-based work
  - Been in industry for 3 years, seeing mature products and higher quality
- Mentioned MuggleNet as his favorite blog and TechCrunch
- JoyStream by a solo founder, trying to merge BitTorrent / BTC
Coronavirus (a16z 16min on the News #21, 1/29/20)
- Judy Savitskaya – 2019-nCoV – 10-20% common cold vs epidemic ones would be severity
- Sequencing this virus has been incredibly quick (within 2 weeks of genome) whereas it’s taken longer in past
  - If someone in SF said they had a cold at a general clinic, they could decide if it’s this or not
  - Figuring out treatments and protocols based on genome and live medicine
- Spike proteins used to enter into lung cells didn’t look as bad as SARS, so they thought it was fine
  - Turns out that it’s actually very similar to the protein
- Nobody really knows – animal sources of viruses (evolving away from human hosts, time in animals)
  - R0 – number of people you’d expect to get sick for every one person that has it
  - Breaking down variables in R0 – how well does virus transmit itself (easy in air, for instance)
    - Is it good at infecting cells? What’s the population like? (Chinese New Year and traveling often)
  - If virus is not that deadly, additional time in the host that can get infected (individually, if deadly and fast, population better)
- Increase in genomic medicine – Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations gave out 3 grants to pharma co’s totaling $12.5mln
  - 12-16 weeks time to develop new drugs based on the new sequence
Epic Battles in Healthcare, FICO Changes (a16z 16min on the News #22, 2/6/20)
- FinTech GP’s Angela Strange and Anish Acharya
- Starting with what is a FICO score – 5 factors: payment history, credit utilization, length of history, new credit, credit mix
  - FICO 2, 3, and 10 now as FICO comes out with reweighting
    - 1 trillion in credit card debt now, so people refi from 25% to 12% loans, but it doesn’t change user spending habits
    - Better job of incorporating debt over a long period of time
  - Designed in 1950s to create a proxy for willingness to pay, originally – now, it’s mostly lenders that have their own algorithms
  - Good lenders will use FICO as a factor but they have their own robust models
- Hacks such as adding kids as authorized users
- Old time, 50-100 years credit decisions made on generations, kids play ball with bankers, etc
  - Bank of Italy (now Bank of America), would make loans to Italian immigrants that other banks wouldn’t lend to
  - 2 drivers – willingness and ability to pay
- International vs US – in US, most decisions decided on score/report, not alternative data
  - In international countries, great way to bootstrap a lending business as a proxy for consumer
  - Difficult to introduce alternative data in the US , cash flow streams for instance
- Epic’s CEO (EHR information on data) letter sent – with Julie Yoo bio GP
  - Rule that’s been around for 1 year in context of a longer standing law
    - Opening healthcare records from ONC (Office of National Coordinator for CMS), gov agencies overseeing healthcare spend
  - 21st Century CURES Act – Upton and Waldon – means by which we implement the act (healthcare costs will rise, care will suffer)
    - Contending with nonprofit orgs with slim margins
  - Uniquely stored in healthcare data is the doctors’ context (and dialogue) – for what reason would you need the context vs “code”
  - Connecting data between APIs and interoperability – major concept
- Clause in rule about screenshot sharing – contractual obligations not to share screenshots
  - In trying to see a workflow in a system to connect yours efficiently – one of Julie’s customers at EHR company got hand-slapped for sharing
- Annual meeting with OMB and ONC for driving sharing and interoperability – Epic wasn’t there – everyone else, systems, plans, incumbents, big tech, EHRc
  - HHS secretary was saying that scare tactics won’t affect what they’re looking for
Introduction to ARK’s Big Ideas 2020 (FYI 1/13/20)
- James Wang interviewing Cathie Wood, CEO/CIO at ARK Invest
  - Building on other years – DL, EV, 3D printing, autonomous ride hailing, automation, genome sequencing, digital wallets and Bitcoin
- New ones – streaming media, aerial drones and biotech R&D efficiency
- Streaming media – changing behavior patterns should catapult the industry, roughly $80-90bn, projecting $400bn+ in next 4 years
  - Most people couldn’t understand why she was buying Amazon at $5bn cap at her old firm (when no profits)
    - Believed about their revenues would increase CAGR at 25% for 20 years, deep value play (exp growth wasn’t understood)
  - Terrible sales out of box retailers – want to survive and go to online
  - Gaming could consume media, so is value in content or platforms (say, Tencent showing the way, maybe) – larger than box office now
    - Every time music has come out, it has cannibalized the other, older parts as replacement
    - Gaming was different – expansive, explosive market as stacking (mobile only added to consoles and others)
- Aerial drones – early side of S curve still – released a paper in 2014 suggesting that if FAA would allow Amazon to deliver parcels over 10 mi
  - Amazon, at that time, could have done it profitably for just $1 per parcel for 5 lb package, for instance
  - Food delivery now, air taxis / passenger drones and given battery tech, could save 20k lives associated with heart attacks – drone faster than ambulance
    - Projecting $275bn food delivery (3mi Delivery for cars is about $4.85 – $5) – drones could do it for $.20, profitably
- Biotech R&D Efficiency as converging Nextgen sequencing, AI, CRISPR editing
  - Impact on pharma and biotech sector
  - Fewer trial failures with DNA sequencing and companion diagnostics for trials, time to market decrease
    - Human trials, CRISPR is curing things such as Beta-_ and sickle cell (2 people)
  - Value-based pricing could be installment payments, for every year you live – reduction of trials and drugs to market, higher pricing utility
    - Margin structure could follow more of 1980s and 90s (mid20-30s) – innovations were exhausted from there, but now should be innovative
  - CRISPR and gene therapies are delivering great results, cures and evidence of these
    - AI and software side with mundane, life science has supported SaaS company in Viva – extremely motivated for productivity structure
    - Most AI companies doing R&D drug discovery are early, M&A ripe – tech in Alpha Go search problems, for instance
  - Analysts can’t just be healthcare, have to be technology as well – permeating every sector
- Over past year, innovation has been highly valued in private space – too few opportunities with too much capital
  - Private is valued much higher – seeing some disappointments, public markets should be ripe (P/E ratio is not ideal)
  - 5 year opportunities, not 1-2 timeline and finding out how much growth they’re going to deliver

How to Motivate Yourself to Build (Notes from Jan. 27 to Feb. 2, 2020) July 22, 2020

Posted by Anthony in cannabis, DFS, Digital, Draftkings, education, experience, FanDuel, global, Leadership, medicine, NFL, social, sports, Strategy, Time, training, WomenInWork.
Tags: cannabs, datascience, eye test, Fantasy football, growth, Kobe, machine learning, medicine, sports, training
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Nope, I’m asking. Not telling. It’s constantly a challenge.

Let’s see. A will to win. Certain things provide you a much clearer picture of an end goal. In life or careers, there is often always a next step for those that are driven. I know many people that have said it’s not a linear path, and therefore you see steps/ladders that may be uneven. It’s hard to take that into consideration to pursue action, then, especially if you’re back at square one. It must be some secondary motivator that keeps us looking forward.

I have an idea page of things I want to pursue. Talking about potential pursuits may be a first step. Talking with others, another. Writing them down allows a concrete step toward accountability. Then, what’s next? Talk to potential customers, people in the space, people that could be of interest. Design something, wireframe or code out a rough sketch. Maybe it’s something to see how much of a concrete idea it is. Ideas sometimes just need another opinion to spur passion – whatever can provide the spark to go further.

With a next step in a career, an idea written out for the next step can be a good thing. Approaching mentors or potential mentors or bosses (strategically) may be that step of accountability. The more people involved, the more likely that path could be disrupted as incentives to provide clear steps wane. The earlier you find that out, the better. It’s unfortunate but situations and circumstances can change on a whim for anyone, so it compounds with involvement of others. I’ve seen that time and time again with friends.

Now, I hope I didn’t discourage with that last paragraph. That wasn’t my intention. So, here’s some good news – work has become increasingly global with the progression of the internet / web, more so this year. There are more people online sharing, collaborating, open to discussion with minimal work except seeking the communities out. Tools are better organized and more broadly applied to help, and more people are generally sharing their experience for us to pattern match or adjust. Action is the step. Or asking what the action may be. Take it together.

Coach Paul Alexander, Josh Hermsmeyer (Wharton Moneyball 1/22/20)
- If you pit OL vs DL – OL is more reliable, similar to pitcher vs batter and pitcher wins
- Beane in Moneyball – didn’t have money to spend so he wanted to get shots at college players since they were less random
  - PFF using survival curves (as time) for measuring lines (from PFF data scientist Timo Riske)
- 16 of 17 INTs for Mahomes has been < 5 rushers
- Coach – more hand-oriented now in passing game than leg-driving or shoulders for the evolution of run blocking
- Josh – turned his attention to music and predicting the first song for halftime show
  - Prop from last year – how long will the national anthem last?
    - Over time, singer spent on song increased (ARIMA model) and he looked at male and female but female was longer at end
    - Gladys ended up going over
  - Billboard is predicting JLo’s most popular song – 20% as Let’s Get Loud or On The Floor (books, too)
    - Acts don’t often start with the most popular song, they end it
    - Setlist.fm as going through common starts
  - Game plan to push as many in the box with the numbers advantage, force Jimmy G to beat them
- Some quantitative coaching models at PFF and other places
  - Mostert as the 2nd fastest athlete in NFL at the line, behind only Lamar Jackson, by mph
- Helpful to sit behind someone as QB? (Jimmy, Rodgers, Mahomes) but counters as Peyton (thrown in), Steve Young
  - Qb as living embodiment of the system, not necessarily ‘system qb’
  - When do we get a handle on a QB?
- Owners as billionaires that earned money in a different industry and hope to be able to transition to teams
  - Experience may or may not come – putting right people in there, getting lucky with all of the processes
  - Little edges, enough chances and them adding up together to finally have success while living through the ups and downs
Ian Levy, Michael Hill (Wharton Moneyball 1/29/20)
- Super Bowl week, Kobe Bryant death – Shaq statement and Kendrick Perkins clamoring for hatchet to be buried with Kdurant
- MJ’s 3 and 2 years off and then another 3 – only had Scottie as the overlap of players
  - Kobe – 2 rings but 3 straight finals with Pau, sans Shaq, Lebron – taking some poor players and winning rings
  - Teams and styles that have changed to give credit to the great ones
- Sac down 17 points with 2min 49 sec – broke a streak of 8,378 straight games of losses
Dr. Shaili Jain, Prof of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, PTSD Treatment, author of “Unspeakable Mind” (Wharton XM, Future of Everything)
- Father was a war vet & born in India, Shaili grew up in England and what she ever knew
- Muted emotions, insidious infiltration of how people work, play and create beyond mind and brain
  - Infiltrates organs, independent risk factors for heart disease, cancer
- Too many factors, 1/3 genetic (not on marker-level, though) to determine PTSD levels or exposure
  - Dose matters – more deployments = more likely, and cumulative effects
- Average clinicians outside of VA have a tough time to diagnose & treat whereas vets and exposed know where they can see it
  - Adherence is much lower in people with PTSD and this is massively under-recognized
- Last thing people want to do is talk to therapists – avoided trauma or be cut off, isolated
  - Health problems often make them lose control
- Hippocampus is smaller in those with PTSD (not sure if it’s cause or effect), amygdala (part of brain that controls danger)
  - Lot of work done in epigenetics, learned behaviors and environment (followed moms that were pregnant during 9/11, escaped)
    - Work done by Rachel at Mt Sinai to follow their children based on biomarkers – PTSD in them/child
- Her take – future is in prevention on three levels – primary, secondary and tertiary
  - Primary: prevent the traumas and crimes
    - Lots of people were starting programs that FELT like it worked w/o evidence or metrics for them
      - How do you train women to defend themselves effectively? If you have it, you can scale and replicate. Still need $
  - Secondary: before and after trauma – “Golden Hours” – can you intervene to prevent onset of PTSD?
    - Showing up in ER, instead of waiting for weeks/months/years when they show up to a therapist
    - Group out of Atlanta’s Emory University in the ER that did RCTs to show those that got prolonged exposure medicine improved
      - Cortisol recipients had less PTSD compared to those that didn’t – brain can heal quickly, comparatively
  - Tertiary: integrated care – 10 years prior, she ditched her other-campus psychiatry office to primary care
    - People show up in primary care, not often in specialty offices, attack head on
- Treatment – first line, standard therapy would be talk therapy (prolonged exposure, EMDR – eye movement desensitization & reprocessing)
  - Focus on dismantling trauma, discussing the event
  - Biggest body of evidence for this being successful as first-line treatment, discussion capability without emotional/physical stress
    - Exposure exercises – measurable body response
  - Meds as second-line treatment (prozac and friends)

Best Ways to Push People to Create (Notes from Jan 13 to Jan 19, 2020) June 30, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Automation, Blockchain, Data Science, Digital, education, experience, finance, Founders, Gaming, global, Hiring, Leadership, marketing, medicine, NBA, social, sports, storytelling, Strategy, Time, TV, Uncategorized, WomenInWork.
Tags: books, broadcasting, drugs, equality, esports, experiences, FDA, media, medicine, movies, sports
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So, my title is a bit misleading because I don’t have the answer. It’s a bit annoying. I have many friends and family members that will cite an interest in making something, or even more generally, wanting something to be made. I try to encourage if there’s even an interest of a consistency in what they’re looking to do. It’s worth sharing if they enjoy it. Encouragement isn’t the part that’s lacking. There’s an accountability or fear of not having the time be worth it.

To me, that’s a bit of a weakness. Sure, you can be scared that it won’t be monetarily advantageous to do it – but that’s the part where your own curious/enjoyment makes up for it. If you’re interested, you may be more likely to generally share and stay consistent than if you’re not. Immediate gratification doesn’t go hand-in-hand with consistency, though. And then the starting point usually has a bit of work. All of this adds up to psyching oneself out before ever starting. All the while, we continue scrolling to the next thing, wondering aloud how nice it seems to be sharing something that we’re moderately interested in.

Peter Guber, Dodgers/Warriors co-owner (KindredCast – WhartonXM)
- Lion Tree CEO Aria Borkhov with Chairman/CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, 4 sports teams
- Hollywood productions for 5 Best Picture nominations (Rain Man winner), Midnight Express, Flash Dance, Batman, Soulsurfer
  - “Tell to Win” best-selling author
- Also owner of Team Liquid and LA FC, professor at UCLA Anderson, Media
- Recorded at the end of WS 2018 – never before having World Series Game 7 at Dodgers stadium
- Can’t just make hits – ups-and-downs are part of the journey, can’t fail will make it so you don’t have success
- Missed out on Dodgers originally when McCourt was buying from FOX, but asked to put up money at last hour, so he backed out
  - Magic brought him in 9 years later and he was more familiar since he owned the AAA team in Oklahoma City
  - Culture providing leadership and top-down, being managing partner
  - Bring best talent, resourcefulness, undervalued performance from someone as surprises, having a long and short-game
    - If short-term doesn’t work, the long-term rarely is cared for
- Caring fully for his team – listen to the audience and imagine their experience is theirs and creating relationships
  - Crucial since you can’t get another audience every time – music, movies, sports
  - Brand affinity as breeding success – crucial that word-of-mouth is more powerful than a 30second clip anywhere
    - Looks at it like bond / what the product means for people
  - Audiences expect experiences (how do they feel, what’s the benefit, life) – customers/consumers are looking to spend only / wallets
- Media – Game 6 had 2nd best since 2009 for viewership
  - How do you get technology into media? Twitter paid $10mln with football, Amazon paid $50mln, Facebook with MLB
  - Linear broadcasting – audience getting every media at once, same way – can’t act on it (analog to digital)
    - Know the individual audience, can talk to friends/you directly – interface with social group, react and a participant
    - Cultivate participation – don’t know about all people generally but now, know the particulars
  - Digital natives – always growing, never had cords – companies need both linear and digital sense
  - Dancing with the enemy – like to kill the other, one is an ally/adversary at different times
  - Can’t take an analog advertisement and plunk it on to digital – won’t be the same
  - When he was in China doing business, he had to go through an interpreter – didn’t have the same feeling/attitude
  - Each sport has unique challenges (and movies) – movie-going has turned into “going to a movie”
    - Driving away from habituation (movie on Fridays) vs (“Let’s go to A movie”)
- Narrative of baseball – can look at different things, fantasy, play-by-play and story
  - Basketball is rapid so you have to address down-time in a different format – paces are more important (digital can help)
  - Gambling will introduce a new evolution – betting on emotions, last-pitch, blowouts will be important still
- Esports – Team Liquid in SC2, LoL, HotS, Overwatch, Halo, CoD, DotA
  - True digital native and a culture change – lifestyle connection is different
  - Became invested in technology after joining Sony and his unique way – his life is connection of artists and audiences
    - How do you create value and multiply value?
    - Consumption with esports as 3 things – expansion, underserving market, global, participatory (could play along)
    - Esports as the music for 18-25 now, lights up their heart (“shut off that music”), engagement attraction
  - Have to understand the language, special – challenge to make money
- Escape velocity for colleges and training, scholarships – getting older
  - Only got into esports Mark Merrill (Riot Games) came to leadership course and was talking about League of Legends, lit him up
- Advertising planning, consumer information, still very early
  - 1 to 1 engagement is the biggest difference – 1 to many probably outdated or less effective
- Made a long bet on VR – 5 years ago – they’re the director – mediators give you the meaning
  - Technology as existing for PoC for phone call where you could turn the fight or a game on
- Fav movie: Godfather 2, Witness — Fav person: Fidel Castro when Peter was doing a show on diving
  - Unbelievably interesting (Castro)
- Reading: Sapiens (rec for Undoing Project), Thinking Fast & Slow
Amy Abernethy (@DrAbernethyFDA), Principal Commissioner of FDA, Vijay Pande, GP on Bio Fund at a16z (a16z Podcast 1/14/20)
- Food, Drugs, and Tech – 100 Years of Public Health
- 113 years ago formed out of 100 laws – hygiene issues as science-based agency
  - Safe and effective medical products to be used with your patients
- Have to come up with flexible mechanisms to avoid and take risks when appropriate
  - Risk-based scientific decision-making, review and expectation of certain risk in products
  - Hepatic failure, may take a person’s life, urgency of problem with number of people of impact, public perception/expectation
  - De-risk: try to ensure pre-conditions are met, toxicity, consistent expectations around clinical effectiveness
- How does FDA (mentions possible show for crises a la CSI: FDA) deal and think of crises?
  - Medical products could have any crises issues (animals, vapes, food, drugs, biologics, devices, cosmetics)
    - Distribution of potential crises are very real – opioid crisis as slowly creeping up – as information accumulates, problem ID
  - Agency – action plan for several parts on what FDA responsible for
    - What can they do to reduce problem? Reduce patient tablets accessible to, for instance.
      - Can increase methods for access for patient-informed labeling.
    - New treatments for pain and solving problem otherwise
- 20% of international GDP regulation under FDA and 15% of food imported so needs to be safely labeled, available in country
  - Investigate trucks across border that aren’t available over borders
  - PREDICT program – 10 years old rules engine where they are most likely to have unsafe food
- Drug shortages – have intervened ahead of 160 drugs for shortages there along with the opposite – what happens if there is one
  - Food-borne illnesses to avert problems and they have these discussions in the morning
- Kits off Amazon for CRISPR – dog glow in the dark, for instance
  - CAR-T as T-cells to re-engineer to supercharge and put back into patient
- Improving software products that help the world of controls
  - How does FDA think about data privacy and ownership?
    - Practically, proprietary information and confidential. Drug surveillance that might be more publicly available.
  - In CIO role, she wants a Chief Privacy Role – when brought up, data even in HIPAA may be re-identifiable
- Platform trials – enabling features within 21st century cures
- Some company/investigators not wanting to subject only product into clinical evidence framework to figure out – especially only shot on goal
  - Taking a while to determine this
  - Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 – contemplation of new payment delivery models, Institute of Medicine research for digital infra in 2007
  - 2008 – GFCrisis for stimulus bill to get the High Tech Act for full-scale distribution of Elec Health Records in 2009
  - Nov 2016 – 21st Century Cures got pulled from shelf as they tried to figure out which was bipartisan opinions
- Food – FDA part, genetic engineer and synthetic biology – talking with USDA to draw the lines here
  - With new innovations, do we need to change regulatory paradigm?
  - How do we ensure consumers know what’s going on? Labels / consistent language (ex: almond milk)
- Smarter Food Safety – possibility for each food to have a full supply chain that we can check on (whether app-enabled, blockchain)
- For future of FDA – far more processes automated using the glut of more data
Seth Walder (@sethwalder), ESPN Sports Analytics Writer; Alexandra Mandrycky, Dir of Hockey Admin for Seattle (Wharton Moneyball, 1/15/20)
- Plus minus for receivers, how the NFL will do statistics
  - Different than hockey +/- but far more team-involved
- Talking an Analytics Coverage for the CFP Championship – what is advantageous, expected, etc
  - Good sports information – bettors can make it as they will – actionable or not
- Daily Wager show – betting and sports and new statistics
  - “Sacks created”, for instance – Zendarius Smith, lead league with 20+ and we’re double-teamed the most often
- Sherman as only targeted 14%, very low for outside corner (one side only – right side)
- Quantitative Analyst, Danny Chu for second person on the hockey side
Cynthia Medina, Founder & CEO of WAGER (Women at Work, WhartonXM)
- Pay equity discussion – safe space for transparent talks
- 15 years as exec recruiter, talent consultant, leadership coach and technical recruiting
  - International relations and policy expert for DoHS, Treasury, JPM
  - Served in Peace Corps as well, and founded Cheeky Monkey (women who don’t want to network)
- Thinking in 3-5 year intervals for Jones C Mitchell – personal level for Cynthia, though
  - Short windows of time, managed by feel – not vision
  - She has 29 aunts/uncles (parents of 15, 14) – curiosity for her but not overall something she was chasing
  - 0 had gone to college, first in family to graduate, get a passport, live abroad
- Lots of layaway for Kmart (waiting 6-9 months), also used to visit Puerto Rico every summer with family – layaway, also
  - Friend group established college as a norm – chose Georgetown since her uncle liked the basketball team
  - She had no sense of the power structure in the US – information and what she was learning
    - Pushes people to apply to hard universities – to be able to make change
- After college – didn’t have a job – got an internship, needed to know she could do it without help
  - Finance area for GAP HQ, could do it (had stayed on a couch initially when she went to SF)
  - Then, decided what she wanted – went to Peace Corp and was the “chicken girl” in Nicaragua
    - Taught how to make a business with microlending loans ($100)
- After Peace Corps – big picture idea for what’s next? Same person – senior year teacher who told her to apply for GU
  - Applies to Harvard – needed a big push – elevating yourself on your own, focus on international affairs
  - Friend at the time was in the area for 9/11 – saw / felt things on 9/11, so 9/12 she went to NY and been with her husband since
  - Felt like she’d done enough for herself, now wanted to serve again – worked for NYPD CT unit, Treasury – anti-terrorist financing
    - Latin American policy expert for the anti-terrorist work
  - She was in DC, husband in NY at the time
- Started a family – husband had to go to SF for his job, 1 child (3-6months but turns out to be 2 years)
  - Everyone else was happy, now time to do what she wanted
  - Wanted flexibility, good at basics, people – razor-like skills on interview process (first for free, then charge)
  - Told what she was doing, advertised it, did her LinkedIn
- Driven by wanting other people to feel content. Having lots of conversations with people who aren’t doing it correctly
  - Asking for right amount, not asking for what they should get
  - Let’s keep good people by being radically transparent – telling husband that she wished all salaries for two days were public
    - Husband, a manager, gave reasons against it (creates more work for managers) – jealousy and infrastructure
  - She BCCed 500 friends – sent email to pair people for salary conversations (1:1) in industry
    - Send LinkedIn and tell her how much everyone made – nothing happened for 12 hours
      - Men, often, would say it’s too personal / we’re good / exec-level where info would be adversely used
      - “My wife doesn’t even know how much I make”
  - Example for 2 people who are now friends of hers – exec woman, exec man – he was making $100/hr more
    - She didn’t want to know how much he was making (he offered)
    - Big data problem – once you know, you have to do something and that’s often where people will fall off
    - Creating database, sheets and sharing this – nothing to do with action / companies doing different things
- With more data, what did she discover and finding the needs?
  - Certain industries, large pay gaps – media, marketing, certain places
    - conversation / article at Google – same levels, women > men but because they were staying longer at levels
  - Making the same in cases but women felt like they didn’t have the same respect / something they weren’t getting
    - Baggage conversations still – persistent imposter syndrome, even when paid well, still work to be done
      - Ability to self-advocate is always around – empowerment to demand space
  - Does workshops out/in companies – compensation with employees in large companies (inc. tech)
  - Example: new shift to tech company – not CEO but 2nd in command or “I’m young”
    - Often hear “well my husband makes more than enough so I don’t need to push”
    - “Money is not as important to me” – don’t see it as failing, afraid, embarrassed to say they want more, know I’m great
  - People will justify when CEOs or execs leave, company wants to bring in diversity hire and pay 60% – women go in to find
- Have to ask what you want? If you want to be a manager but haven’t managed anyone.
  - Is there an ability or opportunity for you where you want to be?
  - If you don’t know what you want – someone will put you where they need you.
    - Haven’t made a decision. If it matters for $125k to do these 4 things, need to make actions to get there.
  - She likes helping people negotiate when they don’t have to – “have to” in short timeframe – next job is when you get promoted
  - Networking as you build relationships before you need them – started Cheeky Monkey because of motivation and clients
Elroy Dimson, Emeritus Professor at London Business School, chairman at Centre for Endowment Asset Management at Cambridge (Meb Faber #100, 3/19/18)
- Author of Triumph of the Optimists – producing the indexes, small cap 100 in London
- 10 countries, a century of data, including the UK for returns
  - Found lots of researchers had general interest in more financial returns historically and added them to the book #2 (2000 years Millennium Book #2)
  - Optimists were those that invested in common shares over bonds/T-bills in companies, which is why they named it thus
- Found out that about 80% of industries that existed at start of century disappeared, and 2/3 of those that exist today didn’t exist then
- Bond market in 1900 existed of some bonds with short maturity like 6-8 years, or in London, had perpetual bonds
  - Composition of mutual fund then vs now – always changing, industries decline and come up
  - Very few survive over the long term – perfectly viable investment strategy as changing
- Countries that were utterly important – assets survived but ownership changed completely (1917 – Russia and 1940s – China)
  - Making the World Index, history for each country, assets going to zero and Index as the same
- Idea that economic growth, GDP growth and stock market returns – discovered a negative relationship between them
- Thinking about valuations – market caps (Japan in 1980s as biggest, US as 50% now)
  - Market cap-weighting as only consistent one
  - Interest rates in 21st century have been way down, real interest rates TIPS / inflation-linked bond of 4%
    - Average now is negative .5 %, promising $1 now, < $1 back later. Gordon model – value of a financial security = D / (r – g)
  - Focus is on real interest rates, nominal is adjusted by inflations in each country (which can be different)
    - Real interest rates were lower in 1970s (minus 10% when inflation was 25%+ and yields were 10-15%)
    - Negative real interest rates are about 1/3 of their 2000+ country years (118+ years, 20+ countries)
      - What’s different/rare now – low real interest rates with low inflation and low nominal interest rates
- Want to bring currency back – most is driven by relative inflation compared to the US – long term it protects you, short term, hurts
- Tilting away from market cap-weighting, seeing other factors that may or may not make sense
  - Factors measure exposure to attributes of companies (relative size, growth, otherwise)
  - Some factors have a reward – growth companies do well (no premium), value companies instead that show reward
    - Rewards for exposure to particular factors (in hindsight, clear) may not sustain into the future
    - Smart beta, Five Factor model, liquid common stock vs illiquid maybe (mutual fund wanting liquidity may take lower return)
- For his book’s update, added a new chapter for Global Investment Returns Yearbook
  - Looking at durable, tangible assets – real estate is smaller (domestic aggregate real estate is smaller)
    - Expected return on housing – between financial return for long-term bonds and equities
      - Expected volatility is also in between those
- His grandmother had a wine shop, he’s done studies on investment returns for 1900 on, postage stamps, wine, etc
  - Best wine as Claret, First Growth Bordeaux, Premier Cru
- Best investment – his education, PhD at LBS and then Cambridge

Prioritizing Personal Projects (Notes from December 23 – 29, 2019) June 1, 2020

Posted by Anthony in Digital, experience, finance, Founders, Gaming, global, Leadership, marketing, social, sports, storytelling, Strategy, Time, TV, Uncategorized.
Tags: #business, Amazon, books, community, content, experiences, finance, freedom, humanity, ideas, investing, Jobs, life, marketing, Money, NBA, questions, reading, social, Strategy, Time, training, TV, video
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We overestimate what we can do in a short time but underestimate what we can do in a longer period. This has been reiterated by Jamie Siminoff, Bill Gates, many others. It’s telling but a great mantra if you can zoom out and high level back off. Scheduling makes this so much better.

I have wanted for the longest time to get Spotify or another podcast to listen to me in the car and allow me to say something basic like “Make a note 30 seconds ago” and let me review the notes later. This could work for audiobooks or podcasts. Even allowing ebooks and articles to bookmark this type of stuff for where the page is would be useful. But maybe that’s through an API in the podcast or Kindle? I’ll have to see and report back.

In light of planning further career-wise, I have taken it upon myself to take on projects that I plan on making public for analysis sake. As an external consultant, much of my work has been NDA / kept private in general for good reasons (VC firms and start-ups are likely some of the more controlled privacy-wise). Some aren’t, and those are typically the ones that I’ve noticed have a much better, transparent brand or have less questions around their business models. A few things have stood out to me about predictions/forecasting, especially in annual or quarterly time frames that publications will release. I have focused on ML/Fintech/Edtech/Data companies over the last 5 years more heavily, so looking through the Fintech 50, Next Billion Dollar (Unicorn) Startups and Hottest 50 LA Startups. Outside the bay area / silicon valley, scanning through the different ecosystems can be an interesting landscape for focused, scaling and growing startups. LA because it’s still in California, somewhat close proximity but ultimately an alternative driving force than typical elsewhere (namely the bay).

So, I’ll have a chance to update my preliminary thoughts on the year-to-year changes – how many startups dropped off, which proceeded to move up the list, any funding raises, product progress or expansion. Hope you enjoy the notes!

Decade in Tech (Wharton XM)
- 4G entering 2011 compared to 5G now
- iPad introduction – better than netbook
  - Tablet rampup – Microsoft following with the Slate
- Social media launching
  - Instagram launch in September 2010 – 2 guys at Stanford
  - Taking photo class from a plastic camera that a professor had given him – best, soft focus and filtered photography
  - Offering to buy Instagram in April 2012 for $1bn
- Tesla as “gift of light” Model S – first time supercharging across the country
  - Musk took CEO role in 2008 (Model S 2012)
- WeWork – likeminded individuals wanting to work with others outside of making money
  - Sharing space to be something bigger
  - $16bn in 2016 to pulling IPO in 2019
  - Strength as marketing capability, not necessarily management
- Controversial events
  - Kendall Jenner at BLM Pepsi commercial
  - United – offering money for ‘volunteers’ until 4 people get off flight
    - $400 voucher and up to $800 – escalation, dragging the Chicago doctor kicking and screaming
    - Many other airlines improving overbookings
- Ice bucket challenge for ALS – 70k tweets per day at peak
- A/R rise as it started with Pokemon Go
- Cutting the chord – rise of unbundling
Brant Pinvidic, author of 3-Minute Rule: Say Less to Get More (Wharton XM, Career Talk)
- Mostly reminding people of what they’re doing badly / guilty – awareness but wanted to change it to make it productive
- Help you get as much info in 3 minutes as possible since “elevator pitch” doesn’t really work anymore
  - Meaningful engagement or not now
- Small ideas not actually small ideas – respect the knowledge of your audience
  - Your excitement is a long history of building information – feed them piece by piece
    - Ex – AirBnb for horses: people that travel with horses need to stick them where they’re going
  - Clarity as super compelling – complications are messed up
- Don’t open with the hook – audience needs to build into the potential
  - Katy Perry example: more Guinness book of World Record accomplishments, for instance
- Selling a show in 12 minutes in Hollywood as junior producer between Simon Cowell and Mark Burnett – had gotten down on himself
- People looking for hook – less dynamic personalities (biotech, oil & gas) that pulls the nervous energy out for why it will be great
- Bringing an idea to life on post-it with just a few words – see the value come together
  - 25 bullet points to pitch his show as well as he did (core piece of information)
- Halfway to understanding what the hook is when you can place the hook
Jonathan Lai (@tocelot), cnsmr team; Joel De La Garza, CIO at Box (16min on News #17, 12/20/19)
- Star Wars trailer premier in Fortnite – JJ Abrams coming out of Millennium Falcon and asked to choose which trailer
  - Interactive and persistent collaboration with Avengers and now Star Wars (lightsaber)
  - 12 million people showed up for Marshmello’s in-game concert (of 250 million users)
- Scarcity in a world of abundance – getting people there
- Brand advertisers have a limited set of options to reach Gen Z – no display ads, billboards, maybe Snapchat or TikTok
  - Hundred hours of watching YouTube or Twitch or in-game events that eventually go out after to share
- Fortnite’s Chapter 2 server downtime of 3 days as “Black Hole” that went viral and video
- Security and backdoor encryption – creating escrow keys to get backdoors
  - Can’t create backdoors undermines the trust in general, even if good guys
- Any discussion around weakening crypto doesn’t make sense
  - Conflation between a few things: we have systems that are built and they should provide backdoors/access to law enforcement
    - Backdoor to phones, for instance
  - Phone uses strong cryptography and backdoor there – focus on cryptography
  - Phone and put in safe – nobody talks about the steel of the safe – access
- End-to-end encryption vs getting phone stolen, for instance
  - Roger Stone investigation: WhatsApp and Signal to communicate but iCloud turned on which saved all messages anyhow unencrypted
  - Metadata and other encryption can tell you far more than even the messages themselves
- If you build devices, how much gov access do you want to provide?
  - Joel (grad student, involved in CDN – bad actors, like pedos, would use and work with Interpol to find them)
What to Know about CFIUS (a16z 12/23/19)
- Committee on Foreign Investment in US on Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018, updated in September ’19
- Katie Haun interviewing Michael Leiter (law firm Skadden Arps) about function to review any foreign investment in US business with natsec concerns
  - 13 agencies ran by Dept of Treasury split between 2 camps: want foreign investment and concerned about security (intelligence, NSA, FBI)
  - Semiconductor moving from US to Japan, for instance, that would limit Japanese investments
- CFIUS limiting in 2006 for Saudi Arabia and Emirates and now is Chinese investment in the US
  - Changes in technology, expansion of data and things that weren’t present even 10 years ago
  - Tech, data touch, real estate, work with US gov or anything else (dog food sold to SEALs)
- Everyone working in fintech, credit reports, broad financial data will have more than a 16-digit credit card number and will be subject
  - 1 million people for arbitrary amount of data
- Prior to CFIUS reform, if Alibaba acquired someone, it was up to both parties to submit to CFIUS – vast txns were never seen, no req
  - Both parties come together, transaction description, foreign acquirer, motivation, business reason
    - Good, very bad (president can veto using Article 2), can impose mitigation for sec risk (board of US citizens, data controls, etc)
  - Pieces of reform that are not voluntary – fines and compliance possible
  - Mandatory if company operates in sensitive sector listed, or produce/design export control tech
    - Includes encryption, investment over some size – mandatory filing
    - High-end types of LIDAR – controlled vs standard for automobile, not controlled
  - Could range from (ER99 not, or export-controlled) – computing power, battery storage, sensors
  - Software tends not to fall under CFIUS unless encryption
- WSJ civil military cooperation – some stuff is mandatory and more stuff will be
- US business – interstate commerce, could be French office with US office in US – CFIUS gets to look at US element of transaction if French company is picked
  - Green-field investments – foreign investments can be made and won’t be looked at, really
  - Ultimate parent and ultimate ownership of acquirer or investment (private equity, capital)
- More than 9.9% equity or some other controlling interest – board seat, for instance
Josh Sapan, CEO AMC Network (Wharton XM)
- Challenging to get through people’s gateways to get to audiences
- Base incumbent business for United States – affiliates, selling ads and that represents their financial fundamental part of company
  - Video prices coming down in different options
  - Spending less money on AMC Networks in the skinny bundles
- Toughest marketplace for Netflix to deal with – Indonesia, as CEO said
  - Vertical scaling vs horizontal
Adam D’Augelli (@adaugelli), Partner at True Ventures (20min VC 12/16/19)
- Investments in Fitbit, Peloton, Hashicorp, Splice, Ring, Automattic, Tray.io
- Instructor at Uflorida in Business Finance, founder of Perfect Wave Records (donations)
- Full-time in June 2010, 10 people total about to invest in second fund
  - Met them through vstocksolutions portfolio company (had worked there internship)
  - Reached out potentially – didn’t know where to start at intersection business/finance/tech – UF not as well-known
  - Phil had offered a role – we like you but haven’t hired someone as junior so come and we’ll see
- Joining as a young one – new firm where you have a ton to do and roles not really defined, structured
- Thinking about portfolio construction and business models (under-represented in vc discussions)
  - Fund-level returns for partners – funds at True are around $300mln with specific institutional capital at pre-seed, seed
  - Investments $500k-$3.5mln targeting 20-25% ownership, $2mln for 22.5%
  - Self-selection bias for why they have a better way for them
- They back founders early, invest $1-3mln and try to own 20-25% where the downside is 1% and it will be a maximize risk for timing
- 28 people twice, 8 people three times for the founders they’re backing now
- Amy Errett – starting Madison Reed, wanted $2mln to get off ground for equity
- In ’06, convincing founders to try not to raise as much
- Lead investment amount – meaningful bias for single lead with deep pockets
  - New group of firms that will work with emerging founders where they can bring others in, potentially
- Ring or Splice are interesting businesses now, but in earliest stages, True able to support them through risks at start
- In each fund, make 45-50 initial investments and reserve heavily
  - 1 or 2 founders, investment in company, will generate the whole fund and 6-8 will be fund-level return (25%+)
  - Inputs to each investment: founder taking tons of product, market size market-risk at their price and raising their type of money
- Culture at True: decisions done by protagonist with support of 1 or 2 others in nonconsensus way
  - Support for whole team and company – investment loss as part of process for repeatable out-performance
  - 1 of 10 says the company fits the model, bring on team and then get excited
- Investing at seed stage – 65% near or at company inception, 1 to 3 founders super early
  - Board is access to True, investment team and founder network – monthly call for an hour or so, call me when you learn
  - Board coffees – 15min conversations on this – enable for speed
  - Take board seat at series A – 90 minutes every 8 weeks, roughly, when they have multiple investors, etc…
- Select funds – pitch to founders: be here day 1, continue to invest as you go further, what’s best for company
  - He was on board at Ring during acquisition – partner John still on at Peloton
- Learned a ton from Jamie Siminoff – how fast you can grow is much faster than you think
  - Taking asymmetric risk early on within business is valuable – ex. DoorBot – Jamie rebranded
    - Ring.com domain found, was going to raise $3.5 mln – ultimate cost was $1mln ($200k on that day)
- Favorite book: Doing Capitalism in Innovation Economy by Bill Janeway and Carlota Perez Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
- Biggest challenge in role: Doing more doesn’t correlate with improved performance – Mitchell and Hashicorp had left a portco and later invested in him
  - Steve and Splice – met in Bogota at a conference and happened to meet him in NYC for breakfast after
  - Don’t know which activities are the right ones
- Knowing more about a market – false sense of security to catch up with knowledge
  - Investing in the Unknown and Unknowable – academic paper – markets in many unknowns where knowing more leads to worse decisions
- David Scott at Matrix – software metrics and repeatable business growth
- Randy Glide at DFJ Growth – embraces risk and has a human approach
- Andy Wiseman at USV – small significant syndicate being a great co-investor
- Pat at Sequoia – depth of knowledge on being a great board member and partner to CEOs
- Recent investment: MemBio – mission-driven bio and positive impact creating red blood cells outside the body

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